On May 28th, we hosted another iPECS Insights session. This is our monthly chance to meet global partners and learn from their successes.
Our hosts this month were Yiannis Demetriou, iPECS Solution Expert at Ericsson-LG Enterprise, and Kostis Nirgiannakis, Managing Director at Blue Technologies.
The title was “Deployment of secure iPECS Cloud infrastructure in Greece”, and the theme was a critically important one: maximizing resilience and security in hosting environments.
Yiannis introduced the theme, before handing the floor to Kostis.
About Blue Technologies
Kostis then gave a brief history of Blue Technologies, explaining the company’s role as provider of iPECS solutions for Greece and Cyprus. The Blue team has more than 30 years of experience in telecommunications, and was one of the earliest European distributors of Ericsson-LG solutions.
Their history and stability have earned them the trust of customers, who associate the brand with premium solutions, service and infrastructure. Kostis explained that this is unusual in the Greek market, where competitors often reduce service quality to market themselves as lower in cost.
This led to the main theme of the session, which was all about high availability and geographic redundancy. Yiannis took over, and described why and how they were able to achieve this in Greece and Cyprus.
The importance of security and resilience
Yiannis began by explaining why security and resilience are so important. First, he outlined the negative consequences of downtime, whether due to cyber attacks or data center failure. These include:
- the costs of investigating the problem
- the costs of remediating the problem
- dissatisfied customers, who may choose to change providers
- reputational damage, which may harm future sales
As Yiannis explained, the costs and complexity of true high availability and geographic redundancy can be high. However, the costs of downtime can be considerably greater and less predictable.
He then pointed out the business benefits of enhancing Blue’s hosting infrastructure. As well as protecting them from the costs of downtime, it would enable them to leverage resilience and security as a sales and marketing tool. Next, Yiannis explained how they achieved this.
Achieving high availability and geo-redundancy with iPECS Cloud
Yiannis explained the networking architecture and data center configuration in detail, with helpful diagrams to illustrate the setup. We will give a brief overview.
They began by identifying two outstanding data centers (DCs), one in Sparta and one in Athens. Both offered excellent internet connectivity and security, while the distance between them ensured more-than-adequate geographic redundancy.
The DCs are connected via layer 2 connectivity. The architecture allows seamless failover between the two DCs. All nodes have their own internet connection, protected by enterprise-grade, next-generation firewall-as-a-service.
Switches are also provided on an as-a-service basis, and are exclusive to the user. Connectivity to the rest of the world is via a multi-homed design to ensure reliability and efficiency.
This is only a brief summary of a complex deployment. What matters most is what it offers to end users, which is true security and resilience.
Achieved through partnership
What is perhaps most important is how this was achieved through partnership and collaboration. Yiannis, one of our Europe-based network specialists, worked together with our team in Korea and the Blue Technologies engineering team to design and deploy the solution seamlessly.
It is another reminder that our global community thrives together through partnership and mutual support. With this in mind, Kostis thanked Yiannis for his expert support and dedication in realizing this project.
Kostis and Yiannis took some questions, and many attendees praised them for a successful project and a great presentation.
We would like to thank Kostis and Yiannis for their insights, and all attendees for joining. We look forward to seeing you all again for the next session.
