Headquartered in Berlin, and now a subsidiary of another German Internet company, Freenet, Strato hosts more than three and a half million domains. These are primarily for German customers, but it has recently expanded into the UK, France, Spain, Italy and the Netherlands.
In addition to web hosting services, Strato provides its customers with a large number of value-added services. The fastest-growing of all these services is the provision of dedicated and virtual servers at Strato’s certified high performance data centres running entirely on renewable energy. This zero carbon service provides Strato customers with a high level of data security, improved backup, increased storage capacity and free technical and customer support.
After experiencing rapid growth, Strato realized it had to quickly formulate a future-proof strategy to manage its server bank and business data in a secure environment using the most energy efficient networking technologies, whilst meeting its environmental policy to reduce its carbon footprint to zero within a cost-effective budget.
“We looked at and tested what was available from different networking vendors including ProCurve Networking, 3Com, and Cisco. We chose the ProCurve switch solution because its performance and security requirements were better than any other vendor, and as a market leader in low power and efficient network design, the ProCurve equipment also complies with our stringent environmental policy,” explains Julien Ardisson, Strato’s Chief Technical Officer (CTO).
Security was a major determining factor in choosing ProCurve according to Ardisson, who stressed the importance of customers not being able to get access to other customer’s server space. “The ProCurve switches provided by far the best network security, enabling us to guarantee our customers’ privacy and freedom from interference,” he adds.
So far Strato has installed more than 1,400 ProCurve 2524 and 2626 rack switches, each securely connecting 22 servers to the Internet via an existing third-party router, the only network equipment from another vendor still being used by Strato.
“ProCurve’s open standards-based architecture and modular design enabled us to integrate our existing third party vendor equipment easily. Not only did this enable us to save on cost by using some of our existing equipment, but it also gives us flexibility to remain at the forefront of technology,” adds Ardisson.
Strato has also recently installed ProCurve 2626-PWR switches providing Power over Ethernet (PoE) which offers further value-add benefits to its customers. Thanks to PoE its server customers now have access to remote Keyboard, Video, and Mouse (KVM) connections. “These allow you to remotely manage your dedicated server as though it were under your desk,” Ardisson says. “Users connect their laptop or desktop to the KVM over the Internet and see a mouse and keyboard onscreen within a Java client.
In addition to improving services to customers, it was also important that Strato improved its own central infrastructure to manage all the services available to customers, as well as network access control functionality. To do this, Strato has installed 24 ProCurve switches, including 5406zl switches at the core, HP StorageWorks EVA6000 Enterprise Virtual Arrays, StorageWorks EFS Clustered Gateways and the energy efficient HP c-Class BladeSystem with 18 BL456c server blades which use up to 27 per cent less power than rival products from other leading vendors.
“We took the decision to replace the existing bits and pieces from Dell and other vendors with the integrated ProCurve/HP package last November. The equipment was delivered in December and it all went live in January, which was a remarkable performance from the ProCurve/HP engineers working with our staff,” says Ardisson.
From January 2008 Strato will be 100 per cent C02 free, and the use of energy efficient ProCurve/HP equipment will help it to reduce its carbon footprint by approximately 15,000 tons of carbon emissions per year.
Looking at the overall experience to date, Ardisson says the equipment has been very reliable. “Whichever vendor you are dealing with there are always going to be challenges to overcome, that’s just a fact of life,” he says. “With ProCurve and HP, we had no issues and introduced a strategy that aimed to eliminate any potential problems, cooperating very closely with our own engineers. This makes our relationship a special one,” concludes Ardisson.
STRATO Rechenzentrum AG, one of Germany’s biggest web hosting companies wanted to provide a secure, cost-effective network linking 30,000 dedicated servers to the Internet and to replace a fragmented central infrastructure with a robust integrated solution.
Replace existing equipment with a range of ProCurve switches and HP hardware which deliver the necessary security and power to replace its central fragmented infrastructure.
