Cloud service provider and cloud broker Node Africa has demonstrated how viable the notion that Africa can and should be a Cloud-First continent. In just six weeks the company was able to deploy a complete greenfield datacentre infrastructure in Kenya, using the full cloud provider stack, vCloud Air Network from VMware, a global vendor in cloud infrastructure and business mobility.
“When we looked into launching the business, I turned to my decade-long experience of working with VMware and decided that it would be the solution on which to build the fabric of Node Africa,” said Phares Kariuki, CEO of Node Africa.
Node Africa was faced with several, significant challenges when building its business, which provides customers with bespoke cloud infrastructure and services that extend to consulting, design, build and deployment of complex IT solutions. First among these was the need to deploy its datacentre in less than two months; next was the need to create a hybrid cloud offering – a combination of a private and public cloud; and finally the need to mitigate the considerable bandwidth challenges so prevalent in and characteristic of Africa.
To successfully meet all three challenges the company deployed VMware’s vCloud Architecture Toolkit to build a scalable cloud infrastructure that uses the vSphere hypervisor; vCloud Director to build differentiated cloud services that are inherently hybrid-aware; and VMware NSX as the basis of this network in order to allow it to use budget-friendly commodity networking equipment.
“The amount of money we have saved on networking equipment, as a result of using NSX as the basis of our network, has been amazing. We saved $10,000 on just our initial network infrastructure investment, that’s big for a greenfield start-up. You can achieve so much more with NSX than traditional network vendors,” added Kariuki.
In addition, Node Africa elected to become a vCloud Air Network partner in order to leverage the service provider-friendly model of securing product, as well as providing it the ability to offer its own customers access to VMware infrastructure on a month-by-month, pay for what you use and pay-as-you-grow subscription basis.
Finally, by using the VMware solution stack, the company was able to mitigate bandwidth constraints and reduce latency, the time it takes for data to be stored, retrieved or streamed, to milliseconds. As a result, Node Africa is now also able to offer solutions such as backup-as-a-service, infrastructure-as-a-service, platform-as-a-service, as well as multi-vendor hybrid cloud offerings.
According to the company, the most substantial benefit enjoyed by its customers who already run VMware in their systems is the ability to replicate to and deploy on the Node Africa’s system in just six hours.
Three months after it launched, Node Africa had 21 clients who were either signed on or test-driving its service and, according to Kariuki, every customer who has opted to try its service has ultimately signed on. Certainly if the Node Africa example proves anything then it is that partnering with VMware is cost-effective route to market for start-up cloud service providers on the continent.
