D-Lake

Highlights

• With Opengear Smart Out-of-Band solution, the D-Lake team can extend its resources across Europe without even leaving its headquarters in Annecy.

   

• The D-Lake team achieved almost immediate ROI using the Opengear Network Resilience platform and saved 12 hours of employee time and significant travel costs with the first customer incident.

   

• Seeing the value that Opengear brings, the D-Lake team created Out-of-band-as-a-Service (OOBaaS) to deliver the same benefits to its customers.

The Story of the Customer

Nestled in the scenic town of Annecy in the Haute-Savoie department of France, D-Lake is a service provider supporting the internet services and cloud hosting needs of customers across Europe.

COO Christophe Kuczynski and the two co-founders bring more than ten years of experience in managed services, having worked for internet service providers, and specializing in Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC), Open Networking Software-Defined WAN (SD-WAN).

Since its inception in 2017, the company has been helping customers with their network deployment and management, focusing mainly on access, IP transit, and cloud hosting.

Partnering with other technology leaders for security-driven networking, data management, or virtualization, the D-Lake team combines its own expertise and know-how with theirs to bring cutting-edge technology and security solutions to its customers.

Challenge

D-Lake operates eight data centers in multiple regions serving customers across France and Switzerland. To meet customer connectivity needs with a small team located in Annecy while keeping operating expenditures (OpEX) low, D-Lake must think strategically. The goal is to extend its capabilities while meeting its contractual SLAs and ensuring business continuity for its customers.

One D-Lake Client issue, in particular, created a challenging situation. “One of our routers in a data center located in Paris required immediate attention,” said Christophe Kuczynski, the COO. The router kept continuously rebooting. Unable to access it, the team could not identify or remediate the issue right away. “It was not feasible for a team member to get in a car and drive 6-7 hours to Paris to the data center to diagnose the problem and remediate it,” says Kuczynski.

“When a link to the router is down in that specific data center, we simply cannot connect to the router to diagnose the issue,” Kuczynski continued. “So we don’t know if there is an issue with the device or if the link is broken or something else, as we’re not on-site.”

“We got our return on investment with the first incident.”

Christophe Kuczynski, the COO of D-Lake

Solution

To deliver uninterrupted service to its customers across the country, D-Lake needed a reliable, easy-to-use remote access solution. “We don’t have to send folks to data centers across the country. And some customers have sites globally, our team cannot scale without remote access” says COO Christophe Kuczynski.

Hence, they chose Opengear ACM7000 Resilience Gateway, CM7100 Console Manager, and the Lighthouse Management Software and the D-Lake team achieved a unified view of the critical infrastructure they manage. The ACM7000 Resilience Gateway provides secure remote access to critical infrastructure devices via Smart Out-of-Band management that D-Lake preferred. With the embedded, global 4G-LTE cellular modem D-Lake now has the critical alternate path. 

Additionally, the team deployed CM7100 Console Manager, the most-trusted console server for data centers or enterprise networks, to safeguard the network operations. Finally, the D-Lake staff can access the routers, switches, PDUs, or other critical devices via the intuitive Lighthouse dashboard. 

Seeing the value that network resilience brings to their business, the team decided to create a service to deliver the same value to its customers. That is when the Out of Band as a Service (OOBaaS) was born. Offered as a service, the OOBaaS provides a turnkey solution for those companies who want to manage all their critical infrastructure devices via a single view-Opengear’s Lighthouse management software without actually owning Opengear devices. 

OOBaaS bundles a Hosted instance of the Lighthouse management software with remote access and connectivity.  Opengear’s Failover to Cellular™ (F2C) capability provides continued internet connectivity for remote LANs and equipment over high-speed 4G LTE networks even when the primary link is unavailable. 

Kuczynski mentions that OOBaaS is like an Uber service. “With one click, you can go to the site where the issue is, and you’ll diagnose the problem instantaneously.” He continued to tell that before they deployed Opengear, “We had to open the Google or Excel sheet and identify the IP address of the Cisco equipment in which port it was plugged, and half of the time it was on the wrong port, so the Excel sheet was not up-to-date. Hence it was tough to remotely access the equipment in a limited time.”

With the Lighthouse Management Software, the D-lake team gets a clear view. According to Kuczynski, “When we deploy a device, we just need to put the name of the equipment in the search bar of Lighthouse, and with two clicks, we can connect to the console of the equipment, no more spreadsheets.”

Results

The D-Lake team saw the benefits of being in control of their network almost immediately. With Opengear Smart Out-of-Band solution, the team diagnosed and fixed a customer issue in a data center in Paris from their headquarters in Annecy, from a 434 kilometers distance. 

Without remote access, D-lake would have sent one of its employees to Paris, losing 12 hours of employee time and risking missing the SLAs. This would have impacted productivity, given the sheer size of the team. Overall, remote access helped them hit their contractual SLAs, ensuring customer satisfaction, and business continuity. 

Using Lighthouse delivers further stability for D-Lake. The team no longer needs to rely on outdated spreadsheets of IP addresses; instead, they glance at the intuitive user interface for a unified real-time view of the infrastructure. 

Finally, D-lake will continue to extend the stability and security that Opengear brings to its customers via OOBaaS (https://www.oobaas.net/). As a Turn-Key solution OOBaaS brings the value and peace of mind D-Lake realized from Opengear to its own customers as a service.