The Need for Agility and Automation
Like other cloud service providers, Hivelocity has been seeing a new and evolving set of market requirements. Their customers want to access more services and run more high-performance business workflows across an increasingly diverse set of distributed cloud resources.
With customers demanding more from their clouds and providers, Hivelocity recognized that one of the chief barriers to meeting those demands was business agility. The Hivelocity team realized that it would become increasingly difficult to provide high quality, end-to-end services if they had to continue to rely on either slow-moving telecoms or shared Internet services for their backbone and cloud on-ramp connectivity.
The company needed to find a network service provider that could reliably and rapidly provide its customers with high quality connectivity, while offering Hivelocity a higher degree of control and automation over provisioning and managing its interconnections.
Connecting from Staten Island to Manhattan
Hivelocity had been introduced to PacketFabric when it chose PacketFabric over traditional telecom services to connect their data center facility in Staten Island into Manhattan so customers could choose from a greater number of Internet transit providers.
“Our choices were to take multiple weeks to lease a private line from a carrier and create a cross-connect in Manhattan, or go to the PacketFabric portal, make a couple of clicks, and then have a private line spun up within moments. We were impressed with the speed of provisioning and subsequent reliability. PacketFabric allows us to deploy quickly, almost at the speed of thought.”
Richard Nicholas, Hivelocity’s SVP of Strategy and Corporate Development
Building an Agile Backbone
Hivelocity reengaged with PacketFabric during their search for a connectivity partner who could reliably provide elastic backbone connectivity services across their 30-plus global data center locations. They had a list of requirements including the ability to create interconnections with broad coverage across their PoPs as well as to Internet Exchange providers; provision bandwidth on demand; to offer redundant connections as required, and to enable immediate access to leading public cloud services.
Hivelocity chose PacketFabric as their strategic connectivity partner because the company had shown it intimately understood Hivelocity’s business requirements and had proven itself to be a reliable partner. But the most compelling aspect of the decision was that PacketFabric offered the most agile connectivity services across a broad geography and portfolio. PacketFabric also augmented Hivelocity’s existing services with valuable new connectivity offerings for their customers.
One of the first actions Hivelocity took was to offer public cloud access provided by PacketFabric. PacketFabric had the relations and provided the high-speed access to leading cloud providers including AWS, Azure, and GCP. With a single cross-connection, each Hivelocity PoP could be connected to PacketFabric, and via the PacketFabric Portal and API, any customer could be given immediate access to these public cloud services.
“When it came to setting up public cloud on-ramps, we could do it the old way, which is to provision cross-connects, set up separate contractual relationships with the public cloud providers, and then wait weeks for provisioning. Or we could do it the new way, which is on demand with PacketFabric.”
Richard Nicholas, Hivelocity’s SVP of Strategy and Corporate Development
Carrier-Class Network and Automation
For any cloud provider, whether they provide bare metal services like Hivelocity, SaaS like GitHub, or UCaaS like Webex and Zoom, backbone connectivity needs to be completely reliable and highly automated. For Hivelocity, PacketFabric stood out from others in this regard, and could be a trusted partner.
“Automation and reliability are key to everything we deliver as a business, so we looked hard at providers to see if they could support us. Unfortunately, we found that many providers simply couldn’t. Some providers would claim that they had robust APIs, but we’d find the API’s were non-functional. We also discovered that though they might claim network redundancy, that when you dug into the details, they simply didn’t have the ability to give us the assurance we needed. With PacketFabric, the opposite was true. Their API is top notch, and their network is carrier-class. Ultimately, we have confidence that when PacketFabric says it will deliver something, we can count on that.”
Richard Nicholas, Hivelocity’s SVP of Strategy and Corporate Development
Just-In-Time Connectivity for Cloud Providers
PacketFabric is now Hivelocity’s “go to” backbone connectivity service provider. Hivelocity can now manage interconnections between all their physical locations, their customer connectivity and bandwidth to the cloud on a just-in-time basis. This allows Hivelocity to ensure superior end-to-end customer experiences, while maintaining maximum business efficiencies.
“PacketFabric enables us to build our WAN at the speed of code, and keeps our costs under control as well. If we are delivering a cloud service that’s on-demand, the fact that we can deliver connectivity on-demand to our customers and that we can consume it on-demand is perfect. It aligns with our business model, our cost model, and with our revenue model which is a perfect marriage.”
Richard Nicholas, Hivelocity’s SVP of Strategy and Corporate Development
About Hivelocity
Hivelocity is a global bare-metal provider of hosting and private cloud solutions with 1000+ peering connections and customers in 130+ countries. The twenty-year-old company distinguishes itself against larger competitors by delivering superior performance, predictably competitive rates, and exceptional customer support. Hivelocity has a proven record of success with a growing customer base, an expanding global footprint, and an industry-leading Net Promoter Score (NPS) of 81.