Customer Success Story
CentriLogic Helps Businesses Speed Digital Transformation
One unexpected consequence of COVID-19 has been the acceleration of digital transformation, and that shift has positioned CentriLogic to thrive. A rapidly growing managed IT solution provider, CentriLogic chose Juniper routing and switching for the foundation of its global IT service delivery.
Delivered
highly reliable managed IT services to midsized businesses over a global network
Enabled
Business agility with flexible infrastructure service delivery
Established
The foundation for network automation and additional operational efficiency
The private equity-backed CentriLogic has grown rapidly by acquisition, with customer demand for its advisory, cloud, application management, and infrastructure services accelerated by digital transformation priorities. The provider operates 10 data centers in Canada, the U.S., and the U.K.
Waqas Siddiqui joined CentriLogic as director of network engineering to drive infrastructure transformation after a series of acquisitions. Rationalizing and standardizing the IT infrastructure would allow CentriLogic to deliver more value to customers and investors by bringing greater reliability, simplicity, and efficiency to IT service delivery.
“We wanted to standardize our infrastructure,” Siddiqui says. “We were ready for the next-generation of infrastructure.” CentriLogic’s engineering team is deeply experienced across the spectrum of network vendors. After a thorough evaluation, CentriLogic chose Juniper for its carrier-grade wide-area and data center networks.
“Juniper had an advantage when it came to platform capabilities, technology, and speed,” notes Siddiqui. “Juniper was everything that we were looking for.”
As a smaller company, we can move very quickly and be more nimble to customer requests,” Siddiqui says. “We can accommodate special requests, such as provisioning large amounts of bandwidth in a matter of days, whereas a larger provider wouldn’t be able to act so quickly.”
CentriLogic uses Juniper’s MX204 Universal Routing Platform to connect its data centers in Canada and the U.S. The MX204 router provides ultra-high 10GbE/100GbE density in a compact, space- and power-efficient form factor.
“The MX204 stands out,” Siddiqui says. “In my opinion, there is no competition for this product. Its services and cost-per-bit are second to none.” The new carrier-grade MPLS network, based on Juniper routing, improved network performance and resiliency, as well as streamlined always-on services delivery to customers. Outages and unpredictable response times that once impacted customers are a thing of the past.
“Before, we have had some weird things happen that caused us to lose fiber connectivity,” admits Siddiqui. “When it happened, the failover of the previous routers could take 30 or 40 minutes. Now with Juniper, we have a more resilient network. The MX204 has a massive BGP table, and if we have an issue, the failover will occur significantly faster, which is impressive because of its price point.”
CentriLogic uses Juniper switching for the core network at five data centers in Canada and other points of presence. An IP fabric architecture collapses the data center network into a two-tier spine-and-leaf architecture that’s ideal for CentriLogic’s large-scale environment. The IP fabric provides high resiliency and low latency across the network. CentriLogic uses Juniper Networks QFX5100 Ethernet Switch and QFX5120 Ethernet Switch for the IP fabric, and Juniper Networks EX4300 Ethernet Switch for the server farm.
As the overlay network, Ethernet VPN (EVPN)-Virtual Extensible LAN (VXLAN) sits on top of the IP fabric, extending and interconnecting Layer 2 data center domains. The result is greater scale, simplicity, and agility.
CentriLogic has laid the foundation for network automation to deliver continued efficiency as its business grows. “Now that we have a consistent infrastructure, automation is our next priority,” Siddiqui explains. “Automation fits in with our ‘do more with less’ philosophy.”
CentriLogic can be confident that Juniper will continue to be a trusted strong partner as the company helps its own customers embrace cloud and managed services so they can be nimbler in an unpredictable world.
“Working with the Juniper team has been a pleasure,” Siddiqui says.
The Products
MX204
The SDN-enabled MX204 Universal Routing Platform provides a modular, automated, carrier-grade solution for service providers and enterprises. The compact platform brings 400 Gbps capacity and a full feature set to space and power constrained environments.
QFX5120
The QFX5120 line offers 1/10/25/40/100GbE switches designed for data center, data center edge, data center interconnect and campus deployments with requirements for low-latency Layer 2/Layer 3 features and advanced EVPN-VXLAN capabilities.
EX4300
The EX4300 line of Ethernet switches are compact, fixed-configuration platforms that satisfy a variety of high-performance campus and data center access needs.
QFX5110
QFX5110 10/40GbE switches offer flexible deployment options and rich automation features for data center and campus deployments that require low-latency Layer 2/Layer 3 features and advanced EVPN-VXLAN capabilities. The QFX5110 provides universal building blocks for industry-standard architectures such as spine-and-leaf fabrics.
Published September 2020