Internet Solutions (IS) has announced that it has extended its partnership with EMC® Corporation by joining the EMC Velocity Service Provider Program as a Gold Partner. Furthermore, IS will deliver a cost effective dual site data replication solution called Cloud Rack that leverages the strong network and data centre capabilities of IS, and is powered by EMC’s storage solutions.
“IS has always had a strong relationship with EMC as all our data centre infrastructure runs on EMC’s market-leading technology,” explains Greg Montjoie, executive: Cloud Services at IS. “EMC has provided the management tools and platform that has enabled us to deliver our enterprise-grade hosted services and architecture to the African market.”

IS aims to accelerate the adoption of cloud-based services with the Cloud Rack storage solution.

“Having identified a growing demand for local enterprise-grade hosting and cloud services at an affordable cost locally, IS decided to bring this solution to market. Cloud Rack offers managed public cloud storage services, computing-as-a-service, virtual data centres and platforms, managed SANs and data back-ups with full disaster recovery functionality,” he continues.

According to Montjoie it was IS’ ability to achieve economies of scale due to its data centre capacity, carrier-grade network architecture and connectivity capabilities, built on EMC’s infrastructure that has enabled IS to deliver these services to market at a price point that can compete with similar services offered in the United States and Europe.

IS believes that these are differentiating factors: “The model makes this type of storage solution accessible, without the legacy investment usually required to implement technology of this level.

“We are confident that with the rapid deployment times and the price points we’ve been able to achieve, this service will appeal to a larger number of clients who require cloud-based storage and disaster recovery capabilities to addresses various business challenges such as regulatory compliance and the mitigation of future IT infrastructure capex requirements.

“It also places companies in a better position to take advantage of important IT trends such as big data and mobility. With these benefits, we are now able to make a serious business case for moving these elements of a company’s IT infrastructure into the cloud,” concludes Montjoie.

“We are delighted to welcome Internet Solutions to our Velocity Service Provider Programme,” says Mauro Bonfanti, group director of EMEA Service Provider Business, EMC.

“Cloud Rack leverages IS’ core strengths of network, data centre expertise and EMC technology to deliver EMC Powered As a Service offerings, designed to help deliver better capabilities to our joint customers who are virtualising and transforming their IT.”