A move into cloud services
The Dutch Caribbean island of Curaçao is known for its crystal-clear waters, expansive beaches and colorful European architecture. It may seem an unlikely spot for Blue NAP Americas to house a multi-tenant Tier IV data center. But the island’s location—90 miles north of Venezuela and 100 miles outside of the hurricane belt—makes it ideally situated as a network access point (NAP) and data solutions hub for the Pan-Caribbean region.
Only a handful of data centers have been granted Tier IV certification. The designation from the Uptime Institute—an organization that sets the tier standards for data centers globally— is reserved for data centers with the highest levels of redundancy and no single point of failure. Blue NAP Americas fully commits to the designation, promising its data center customers up to 100% uptime for power and cooling.
The 5-year-old company may be relatively young, but since its inception it has set big goals. In fact, it first targeted large international corporations as its primary market, with some success.
However, as the advantages of its strategic location became clear, Blue NAP Americas shifted its focus to businesses closer to home. In the process, the company examined how its products and services could best serve local customers. “We quickly realized that to cater to the small and medium businesses in the regional market, we’d need to invest in a cloud offering,” says Danilo Zabala, CEO of Blue NAP Americas.
At the time, the company’s legacy cloud platform was incapable of providing the modern, robust capabilities necessary to offer customers cloud services at a competitive price.
The company sought to build a private cloud infrastructure that could safely and securely deploy the infrastructure as a service (IaaS) offerings its customers wanted and needed.
“Since launch, our cloud services offering based on [Kyndryl’s] solution has far exceeded expectations.”
- Danilo Zabala, CEO, Blue NAP Americas
Leveraging Kyndryl’s regional relationships
After evaluating several large cloud providers, Blue NAP Americas chose Kyndryl to help select, develop and deliver its new cloud infrastructure. Kyndryl’s highly successful relationships with many of the financial organizations in the area, as well as its reputation for delivering high-quality solutions and services, made it stand out from competitors.
“I would say 90% of the banks in the area are accustomed to [Kyndryl] infrastructure and have a level of comfort with it,” says Zabala. “That was key in choosing a new cloud platform. Because obviously there’s added value in terms of the quality [Kyndryl] provides, as well as the history the banks have with such a remarkable company. So that made our decision that much easier.”
Blue NAP Americas began working with Kyndryl to evaluate cloud platform options. Ultimately, the team chose the Kyndryl Network Services solution, VersaStack, an integrated, converged infrastructure designed for quick deployment and time to value.
An optimized network and interconnectivity across physical infrastructures, virtual infrastructures and “as a service” ingestion points help facilitate cloud adoption throughout the enterprise. The solution supports the development and operation of the client’s new cloud environment, and serves both production and disaster recovery purposes, with no single point of failure.
The Kyndryl team managed the project end-to-end, from design, sourcing and implementation to onsite training of the Blue NAP Americas staff. “The entire onboarding experience was very pleasant,” says Zabala. “We were able to acquire a turnkey solution that includes not only the infrastructure but also professional services. And the Kyndryl team gave our engineers an opportunity to learn first-hand how to set up, operate and maintain the platform.”
The Blue NAP Americas team was particularly impressed with the level of expertise Kyndryl provided. Zabala explains: “We had access to the top architect from [Kyndryl]. He even flew down once and was available over the phone for online training and further technical discussions, which was fantastic.”
The Kyndryl team had the new cloud infrastructure up and running in less than three months. Blue NAP Americas was able to start capitalizing on its investment shortly thereafter.
The new offering reaps benefits
Since Blue NAP Americas launched its new platform, cloud services has risen to the top of the company’s offerings. A recent performance analysis of the company’s portfolio—which also includes colocation, managed services, office space and business services—ranked cloud services highest, generating approximately 40% of all business.
And the platform provides other benefits, as well. According to Zabala, the time required to deploy a virtual machine has decreased from days to minutes. What’s more, performance has improved significantly. Traditional networking approaches and the legacy platform presented numerous ongoing problems, making it difficult to keep pace with change and take advantage of new and differentiating technology. But with the introduction of the new Kyndryl solution, the journey has been virtually trouble-free.
By developing a new network environment with the help of Kyndryl Network Services, Blue NAP has been able to incorporate flexibility, automation, high availability and open standards into its IT landscape. Working with Kyndryl, the company has built a foundation for the latest technologies and future hybrid cloud adoption.
Currently, Kyndryl provides support on an as-needed basis to accommodate the growing need for agility and scalability, as a recent incident illustrates. Blue NAP Americas had been so successful onboarding customers onto the cloud platform that it was running out of memory. During the memory upgrade, the customer did not experience any downtime — a marked improvement over the downtime required for hardware upgrades to the previous platform.
Blue NAP Americas plans to continue working with Kyndryl on platform adjustments in the future. “Right now, we’ve upgraded the memory capacity and it should be sufficient,” says Zabala. “And we’ll call on [Kyndryl] again for additional expansion of the platform.”
October 2021
