When Routed, a neutral cloud provider, looked to develop the backbone of its cloud business, the company turned to VMware and its vCloud Director to help build a multi-tenancy environment that could provide its customers access to a high performance, highly available cloud infrastructure that enables them to extend or migrate to infrastructure in the cloud.

“I have worked with myriad companies, both locally and abroad. It was my experience in building hosted managed services companies in the UK that was the genesis behind the idea of Routed. The business simply had to support multi-tenancy in the cloud, based on my experience I knew that VMware vCloud Director is the Rolls Royce of Service Provider platforms, and could help solve this challenge,” states Andrew Cruise, managing director at Routed.

Selecting VMware, the company set about building an environment that would enable its customers to move business applications from their own environment to the cloud, as well as provide service provider customers the ability to outsource non-core cloud-based services to Routed. This “neutral cloud” environment was built in just 6-8 weeks.

“Clients don’t want to or need to know about the technology behind the scenes. It just needs to happen. Through the deployment of NSX we were able to leverage its virtual networking functionality and easy to use interface, to deploy an environment that supports secure multi tenancy, and clustering of compute and storage into a single environment, while not hindering performance,” adds Cruise.

With VMware vCloud Director, VMware vSphere, VMware vCenter and VMware NSX, Routed was able to deploy three environments; two independent production sites for reciprocal disaster recovery and a lab. While Routed is itself an ISP, it remains open access and vendor neutral, encouraging service provider customers to access its environment through their own connectivity and extend services to customers using their own bandwidth.

“VMware NSX enables us to cross connect environments, offering existing VMware customers a huge level of comfort. With VMware NSX we can offer secure isolation of multi tenants, and there is a self-service component that lets customers control their own settings,” states Cruise.  “We had two datacentres up and running in three months (between 6-8 weeks). I challenge anyone to do it in that amount of time with another solution. As a start-up, we needed to mobilise quickly and because we were starting from scratch, we had to get a stable, secure environment that we could start selling very quickly. VMware enabled us to do this.”

Today Routed is a member of the VMware Cloud Provider Program and is able to on-sell these services to customers as a 100% Cloud Service Provider (CSP).