Zoréole Services Boosts Efficiency & offers Managed Out-of-Band

Highlights

• Zoréole Services was founded in Montmorency, France in 2014 as an IT consulting services company.
• As an organization, Zoréole Services needed to scale up in order to support its customers with networks across Europe, including some in hard-to-reach locations.
• After implementing Opengear’s network resilience platform Zoréole Services experienced remarkable efficiency improvements. Without increasing their budget, they were able to multiply their team’s capacity.

Customer Story

Zoréole Services was founded in Montmorency, France in 2014 as an IT consulting services company with a primary focus on network design. Over the last decade, the company has evolved, helping more than 60 customers to improve their network infrastructure integration, architecture services, and technology audits.

According to their Chief Technical Officer, Alexandre Girard, the company has leveraged its founder’s 20+ years of networking and security expertise focusing on technical execution. Zoréole Services recently began offering managed services in response to customer demand for their specialized expertise. Its clients span various industries, from retail to online betting to cloud and peering services; most are headquartered in France, many with a global presence.

“Our target market consists of technology-driven organizations with networks that depend heavily on network resilience,” explains Girard.

Challenge

Efficiency is a crucial aspect of Zoréole Services’ operations. The company operates entirely remotely, with a team of ten employees spread across France. It needs to use its resources efficiently to oversee the health of its network. As an organization, Zoréole Services had to scale to support its customers with networks across Europe, including some in hard-to-reach locations. In doing so, they needed to deliver more value without incurring higher costs.

Over the past ten years, Zoréole Services has led 16 customer data center migrations, providing services such as network design, installation, configuration, and automation. Although these migrations have been successful, and even with network monitoring tools in place to spot potential issues, Girard has highlighted a potential risk faced by their customers. Without an out of band network, customers are unable to access such network devices as switches or routers during an upgrade or in the event of an unplanned outage..

“Zoréole Services chose to partner with Opengear because it is the most complete out of band solution in the market”
Alexandre Girard, Chief Technical Officer (CTO), Zoréole Services

Solution

Partnering with Opengear proved to be instrumental in achieving the efficiency and cost savings that Zoréole Services sought. Opengear’s Smart Out of Band allows organizations across the globe to ensure resilient backup connectivity, seamlessly access devices in remote data centers, and reduce costs.

Using this solution, Zoréole Services deployed Opengear’s ACM7000 Resource Gateway, CM8100 Console Manager and OM2200 Operations Manager product families in its data centers. The ACM7000 Resource Gateway offers a secure remote access to critical devices via Smart Out of Band management, making it an ideal solution for low-density IT deployments. Additionally, it comes with an embedded global 4G-LTE cellular modem, which provides an alternate path for a proper out of band management network. Whereas CM8100 is best suited for dense IT environments as it brings simplified integration, reduced overhead and simplified cabling. CM8100 10G models can manage even more devices and connect to high-speed networks easily. Finally, Opengear OM appliances combine the capabilities of a Smart OOB™ Console Server with the flexibility of Automation.

Zoréole Services found Opengear’s Smart Out of Band solution to be comprehensive yet still easy to set up and configure. Impressed, the company decided to partner with Opengear and resell these OOB solutions to customers who wanted to streamline their operations and needed help managing that undertaking. To address the demand, Zoréole Services started to offer Opengear’s Smart Out of Band solution as a managed service in February 2023 and have not looked back since.

According to Girard, Zoréole Services chose to partner with Opengear because “it is the most complete out of band solution in the market.” Zoréole Services’ customers understand the value of having a separate management infrastructure, notes Girard, one that does not depend on their production network.

Most recently, the Zoréole Services team received an alert from a monitoring tool installed on a customer’s infrastructure. The alert indicated a network device issue with ICMP backings. When they connected via the Opengear device, they discovered that the equipment rebooted in a loop, and the memory log showed numerous error messages. They attempted to recover the equipment from the bootloader but failed, as the flash memory was dead. Once Zoréole Services diagnosed the issue, they contacted the equipment vendor, shared the logs and asked for a replacement unit. All this happened after midnight, yet when Zoréole Services’ customer walked into the office the next day, they were presented with a solution, not a problem. The customer had a trouble ticket in place, their RMA unit already on its way while the vendor was working on a permanent solution.

Results

Zoréole Services experienced remarkable efficiency improvements after implementing Opengear’s network resilience platform. Despite not increasing their budget, they were able to multiply their team’s capacity to support their customers.  Within a few months of launching Out of Band as a managed service, 15 customers with 50 or more users adopted Zoréole Services’ out of band managed services. According to Girard, one of the key benefits for Zoréole Services’ customers is the reduction in time spent troubleshooting or remedying an issue. Opengear accelerates time to resolution by 4-8 hours during disruptions and speeds up the time to completion during upgrades. As for Zoréole Services, in addition to being able to offer out of band managed services to customers with a staff of only ten people, it can now manage its data centers with ease. The team can diagnose issues, compile information, and take action to solve problems, again resulting in significantly faster time to resolution.

Looking to the future, as their installed base grows, Zoréole Services anticipates leveraging more from Opengear’s portfolio, particularly the Lighthouse Central Software solution. Lighthouse is a centralized and secure portal for Opengear’s network resilience platform. With the unified display Lighthouse offers, Girard and this team will be able to easily deploy, manage, and remediate their Opengear appliances and other physical and virtual connected resources remotely. Girard expects this to bring efficiency gains from which the team, the business, and its customers will benefit.