Ethernetics
Ethernetics is a Belgian high-tech startup, focussed on reducing the carbon footprint of data centers. We lower energy consumption, optimize the performance and maximize the longivity of data center equipment. We need to gather massive data from customers in the telco business and other high performance data centers. These data are used to train predictive algorithms and to provide detailed monitoring services to our customers. We started to use the cloud-services of GIG tech in May of 2020.
Covid
As the Covid19 crisis struck Ethernetics -and the rest of the world- we were primarily attracted by the promise of cost effectiveness by GIG tech. But we found out that wasn’t the only thing that makes GIG attractive, as I ‘ll explain later. We run a private cloud at GIG tech. Our costs are about ¼ of what we would have paid at the most renowned of the big tech service providers. Yes, you read it correctly, we were able to reduce our cloud expenses by 75% by shifting towards GIG Tech for cloud services.
Metered cloud usage
GIG charges their customers solely per metered usage of their services. This is much simpler than what we experienced at the BIG TECH cloud providers. We did not at all like the degree of difficulty to pre-calculate our costs at our former provider. You need a lot of specialist knowledge to assess your future costs and especially when you’re cash-restrained, that turns out to be a major issue.
GIG tech has a unique pricing system, completely on a pay-per-use basis. GIG’s pricing is based on the CPU compute capacity, RAM Memory, hard disc capacity and the IOPS and external network traffic (per Tb) that you have really used.
TCO reduction
Furthermore, we were able to reduce our internal costs because we can deploy virtual machines a lot faster and we need less time for administration.
Something that struck our database administrator was the remarkable ease-of-use, compared to big tech service providers. The UI is very simple. You can find what you need in a minimum of time and launch your own services with little effort. The most important (basic) functions are very easy accessible, like deploying VMs, pause, stop, reset or reboot the OS.
Ease of use
When we deploy a virtual machine, the network configuration is created in a fully automatic way. No human interaction is required for configuration.
For advanced functionalities, like adding RAM memory, or to scale up or down the HD memory capacity, GIG has a simple and well documented API.
Another nice element is the possibility to add custom machine images for variable setups. Ethernetics deploys customized Zabbix setups for monitoring and we reuse the images to deploy new virtual machines. This speeds up the work of our administrator significantly.
Customer centric
Moreover, GIG tech sticks to its nice start-up mentality, although it has been around for many years. We have easy and personal access to GIG’s internal experts when we cope with day-to-day scaling issues, ensuring we get timely answers to our questions. This helps us build reliable solutions for the benefit of our own customers and gives us the comfort of knowing we have help readily available when things get difficult.
Conclusion
In conclusion, Ethernetics has become a happy customer of GIG tech in the last couple of months. Although GIG’s services are not worldwide available (yet?) we value the cost effectiveness, the ease of use and their customer-centricity.
