Certus IT stays ahead of the crowd in the Cloud

NGD certus

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FOUNDED IN 2000 and headquartered in Newport, Certus IT has grown to become one of the largest specialist IT consultancies in South Wales, employing 30 staff and supporting over 200 customers in the UK and Europe. Among these are the Millennium Stadium, GoCompare.com, Freshwater, Broomfield & Alexander, Julian Hodge Bank, Tenovus and Watts Gregory LLP.

Organisations from a broad range of sectors have come to rely on Certus for its high quality technology services, from infrastructure design and implementation to managed IT support services, virtualisation, private cloud infrastructure solutions and data back-up and disaster recovery systems. An impressive certified partner status with such major technology vendors as Microsoft, Dell and Cisco, has also firmly established Certus as a software, hardware and network product specialist.

Moving into the Cloud with confidence
In 2011, having identified the huge market potential for offering existing and new customers private cloud services, Certus recognised that partnering with a proven, forward looking data centre operator was essential for underpinning its brand new Data Centre division. In order to bring its vision to life and deliver the economies of scale, improved efficiency and speed of deployment promised by Cloud solutions, Certus knew that data centre power, space and room to grow were top priority.

As part of its data centre industry evaluation, the company turned to NGD, a UK data centre operator which had opened a tier 3 carrier neutral mega data facility near Newport two years earlier. At 750,000 sq ft and one of Europe’s largest data centres, NGD Europe had been purpose built to support large-scale high density rack server requirements from major global corporations. It is built to a US earthquake-proof design with comprehensive physical security including double and triple skinned walls, bomb proof glass, prison grade perimeter fencing, anti-ram bollards, infra-red detection, CCTV, and highly trained security guards. Among its many other features are a direct connection to the national grid via an on-site power substation supporting up to 180 MVA of 100 per cent renewable power, and multiple on-site fibre connections providing nationwide and international low latency communications links.

“We quickly realised that NGD could offer us a very secure and cost-effective data centre solution with more than enough power and scalability for meeting our immediate and future growth plans,” recalled Paul Brown, CEO, Certus IT. “While these impressive attributes, along with industry leading uptime SLAs, Green energy efficiency, high speed fibre communications and a raft of industry standard accreditations made NGD a very compelling proposition, it was also their ‘can do’ approach, flexibility and quality on-site support services that made the whole package really stand out.” .

Following the decision to go ahead, NGD built out a private, secure data hall in a matter of weeks - rather than months - with the necessary space, state-of-the-art power and cooling infrastructure to support Certus IT’s equipment. This included multiple racks containing Dell Enterprise storage systems and servers running virtualisation technology from VMware and Microsoft. Ready for business by November 2011, the new tier 3+ data hall marked the launch of the Certus Data Centre and the beginning of an aggressive strategic growth plan for the whole business.

Room for growth
In just 18 months the new Data Centre division grew to account for 20% of total Certus IT sales and is now seen as key to helping drive the company to a £10 million turnover by 2015.

To keep pace with such rapidly growing demand from customers for its cloud services a second dedicated Certus data hall is currently nearing completion at NGD Europe. This will house further multiple racks to provide the additional storage and processing capacity necessary as the company targets more businesses in the South East of England with the help of its recently opened London sales office.

“The planned expansion of our Certus Data Centre speaks for itself in terms of proof of concept as well as our total satisfaction with the data centre facilities provided by NGD,” said Nigel Griffiths, Commercial Director, Certus IT. “NGD’s secure, resilient and low cost data centre environment is essential to us being able to deliver very price competitive cloud computing services without compromising security and resilience. Ultimately we have to fulfil stringent customer service level agreements that demand mission critical data is available 24/7 and always in safe hands.”

Business benefits
Since launching the Certus Data Centre division at NGD Europe, Certus has enjoyed the peace of mind that comes from choosing a modern, secure and highly resilient data centre facility. While these features have all contributed to the success of the new division it is perhaps that unique NGD ‘X Factor’ which counts most of all.

Certus IT’s Paul Brown explains, “NGD really does offer the Rolls Royce which together with their responsive service provides us with a very strong competitive advantage in an increasingly crowded market. This has helped us immeasurably when competing for business, especially against the many cloud service providers relying on data centres in London and the South East that can cost around twice as much on space alone. Without doubt our partnership with NGD will become even more strategic as we push further into these regions.”

Simon Taylor, NGD’s co-founder and Chairman said, “It has been a pleasure to see the Certus Data Centre expand so rapidly since launching only 18 months ago, attracting companies from far and wide into our facility along with major vendors such as Dell, Microsoft and Cisco.

“In the spirit of a true partnership our successful relationship with Certus IT has added value to both parties and for NGD one of the major benefits has been the ability to support businesses with smaller rack requirements. This resulted in NGD launching a Channel Partner Programme last year which is already delivering significant new business and ideally complements our core
wholesale data hall business.”