Featured content from our partner, Lenovo.
Background
Headquartered in Toronto, Canada, Jolera is a multinational technology hybrid aggregate service provider (HASP) focused on delivering end-to-end IT solutions. With services including customized technology solutions, cloud and on-premises data migrations, and IT device and infrastructure management, Jolera operates across North America and Europe.
Over the last decade, cloud offerings have surged in popularity—and today, cloud-first and cloud-only strategies are rising on the agendas of thousands of companies around the world. The benefits of the managed services model are clear: rapid provisioning of new services, elastic flexibility, and high operational cost-efficiency.
“There were a number of reasons why we selected Lenovo to deliver our new infrastructure platform. Lenovo was one of the few vendors we evaluated who could deliver everything we were looking for in a single contract: including compute, storage, and cybersecurity solutions. From the beginning of our request-for-proposals [RFP] exercise, it was clear that Lenovo were experts in infrastructure deployments, which gave us a great deal of confidence.” —José Martins, Vice President, European Sales and Operations, Jolera Inc.
Challenge
Although many cloud services providers promise all these advantages and more, Jolera identified a significant gap in the European cloud marketplace. From its conversations with enterprise clients, the company knew that the billing models of some leading cloud services companies often lacked transparency—leading to difficulties in budgeting for IT resources and monthly fees that were higher than expected.
José Martins, Vice President, European Sales and Operations at Jolera Inc., explains: “One complaint we hear again and again is the fact that some large cloud providers calculate their monthly fees based on wide range of factors, including the number of processors, hours of uptime and amount of usage. Because there are so many variables, monthly costs can be difficult for businesses to predict. We saw a major opportunity to grow our client footprint in Europe by offering enterprise-class services with truly predictable pricing.”
Why Lenovo? High-Quality Solutions and a Strong Partnership
To lay the foundation for its new offering, Jolera chose Lenovo ThinkSystem SR630 servers equipped with powerful 2nd Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors, connected to Lenovo ThinkSystem DM5000H and DE4000H storage arrays. Virtualized with VMware vSphere, the new platform comprises virtual environments running the Microsoft Windows Server and Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating systems.
To ensure its clients’ sensitive data is protected around the clock, Jolera augmented its solution with a disaster recovery environment running on Lenovo ThinkSystem SR530 servers, with Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors, with regular backups to IBM TS4300 tape libraries for long-term data retention. As an additional layer of protection, Jolera uses the Lenovo YourDrive YourData service to retain possession of any failed drives—ensuring it can meet its clients’ rigorous data governance and information security requirements.
“Most importantly, we trust Lenovo. We wanted a strategic partner that would be committed to our success in the long term, and the effort that the Lenovo team put into the project from day one indicated to us that they would go the extra mile to help us achieve our goals. We’d already been using Lenovo laptops and servers on a smaller scale for a number of years at our innovation lab in Portugal, so we knew first-hand that Lenovo offers impeccable support.” —José Martins, Vice President, European Sales and Operations, Jolera Inc.
Simple Management, Cost-Effective Storage
Working together with Jolera’s internal IT engineering team, Lenovo helped to deploy the new solution at a large colocation data center in Porto, Portugal. Today, Jolera uses Lenovo XClarity to manage all its compute and storage resources as a single pool, enabling the company to reduce the time, effort, and cost required to monitor and manage the infrastructure.
“The performance, availability, and reliability of our Lenovo solutions have been absolutely rock-solid, and we’ve been very impressed by how easy the XClarity solution is to work with,” explains Martins. “One of our first achievements was boosting the deduplication ratio of our storage solution from 3:1 to 4:1, simply by using the built-in tools in ThinkSystem. Without question, this improvement will help us to contain our storage spend. What’s more, the 2nd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors help ensure the very highest levels of performance for client workloads.”
Results
With Lenovo solutions at the heart of its new cloud offering, Jolera is ready to sprint ahead in Europe’s cloud services market. The company has already onboarded several large enterprise clients to the platform and sees great potential for growth on the horizon.
"We will continue to optimize our data center with tools and guidance from Lenovo and Intel.” —José Martins, Vice President, European Sales and Operations, Jolera Inc.
“We now offer our clients a straightforward cloud proposition: one single, predictable fee at the end of each month, with no hidden costs,” continues Martins. “We are already supporting a number of major companies with up to 7,000 employees. Despite the demanding workloads, our Lenovo ThinkSystem platform has never missed a beat.”
As its business grows, Jolera knows that its Lenovo solutions will scale effortlessly. Martins elaborates, “Over the next three years, we project 25% year-on-year growth in our client base, and that our cloud offering will contribute up to 20% of our total European revenues by the end of 2022.1 Scaling out to accommodate our future growth couldn’t be simpler; we just plug in a new Lenovo server or storage array, and the resources will be available in less than 15 minutes.”
As it continues to develop its cloud services operations in Europe, Jolera is confident it has found the ideal partnership for long-term success.
“The close, strategic relationship between Lenovo and Jolera has helped to make our innovative cloud solution an unqualified success. As we continue our business growth across Europe, we look forward to building on our close relationship with Lenovo in the years ahead.” —José Martins, Vice President, European Sales and Operations, Jolera Inc.