Ensono is a managed services provider offering a comprehensive suite of services, including hosting, private and public cloud solutions, and expert consulting. Since its inception in 2015, the US-headquartered company’s growth has exploded. Today, Ensono helps more than 230 clients worldwide, employs over 2,800 experts, and yields USD $1 billion in revenue.
As Ensono grows its customer base, the increasing complexity and diversity of IT environments require consistent service delivery, lower costs, better capacity management, and simpler operations. The management of an increasingly diverse array of hardware load balancers was becoming difficult to manage, scale, and maintain.
Ensono needed a resolution because load balancing is critical to optimizing the flow of its customers’ network traffic to ensure the high availability, optimal performance, and reliability of applications. Another challenge was that the use of hardware appliances necessitated overprovisioning to accommodate future growth and unpredictable traffic, leading to significant CapEx exacerbated by disaster recovery and testing needs.
Nigel Wright, senior director of infrastructure architecture, Ensono, explains, “We were using a range of hardware load balancers for our dedicated and shared platforms, which made it very difficult to have a consistent service methodology. We were looking for a cost-effective load balancing solution that enabled us to deliver a consistent service across all our environments and to all our clients.”
Load balancing with reduced CapEx and OpEx
Ensono turned to Broadcom for its VMware Avi Load Balancer solution to replace its hardware appliances. The shift to a software-defined approach quickly resulted in time savings for Wright’s team and cost savings for the company. Manual interventions are minimal, and data center visits to configure, maintain, and replace appliances are no longer required. Instead, configurations are now automated, and updates are much easier for the team.
“Our hardware load balancers were typically overprovisioned to handle anticipated growth over five years, which resulted in high CapEx costs. In contrast, because of the OpEx nature of VMware Avi Load Balancer software, now we only pay for what we use, when we use it. Coupled with its advanced automation capability, we’re managing our load balancing at significantly reduced operational costs.” – Nigel Wright, Ensono
Accelerated service delivery to Ensono customers
Importantly, the new approach has also increased the speed of service deployment for Ensono customers.
“In one of our client implementations, there was a missed load balancing requirement. The software-defined nature of VMware Avi Load Balancer allowed us to implement 10GbE with load balancing capabilities in a single day. With traditional hardware load balancers, there would have been an extensive procurement cycle as well as physical cabling infrastructure and configuration that would have taken weeks or months.” – Nigel Wright, Ensono
A unified platform simplified with centralized policies
Nigel and his team operate VMware Avi Load Balancer through a central control point. From there, they can manage load balancing configurations and policies across all their customers’ environments—on-premises, private cloud or public cloud—and provide the consistent service delivery model they aspired to with a universal platform.
“With VMware Avi Load Balancer, we can deploy new load balancing instances on request and automate that capability. With its central control plane, we’ve got one point of configuration where we can deliver services to clients of all sizes in a shared and dedicated way,” says Nigel.
The load balancing solution has also allowed Ensono to provide robust disaster recovery (DR) testing capabilities, which is particularly valued by its finance and government customers.
“Prior to VMware Avi Load Balancer, we would spend weeks making sure the DR test load balancers were the same as the production ones. Today, we can spin up that load balancing in less than five minutes and, because automation allows a perfect clone, we have 100% confidence that that load balancing implementation is accurate.” – Nigel Wright, Ensono
Troubleshooting from hours to minutes with real-time analytics
Nigel’s team has also gained increased insight into application performance and network latencies, with real-time analytics that provide actionable information.
“In our first customer implementation of VMware Avi Load Balancer, the client was experiencing intermittent application performance issues. Using the analytics capability, we were rapidly able to identify a misconfiguration with a single server, reducing the troubleshooting time from hours to minutes.” – Nigel Wright, Ensono
A platform for future growth
Nigel is keen to gain even more capabilities from the solution. Ensono currently utilizes cloud-based Web Application Firewalls (WAFs) to protect its customers from cyber threats, but plans to replace this with the intelligent WAF feature built into the load balancing solution. The company is also planning to provide a VMware Cloud Foundation platform with integrated VMware Avi Load Balancer to enable a more flexible service delivery model for its clients.
“We find VMware Avi Load Balancer to be a flexible platform. It has greatly improved our ability to support our customers, and we’re looking forward to using it to improve the breadth of capabilities that we can offer,” Nigel says.
