Customer Success Story
Belgian Web Hosting Company Saves Time and Money by Automating Service Requests
Combell is obsessed with its customers, guaranteeing satisfaction or money back. It offers hosting, email, applications, and managed services with free support, day or night, and even on holidays. The rapidly growing company relies on Juniper networking to deliver digital services.
Overview
| Company | Combell |
| Industry | SaaS Services |
| Products used | MX480, QFX Series, QFX10008 and QFX10016 |
| Region | EMEA |
Delivered
On brand promise of reliable Web hosting for businesses
Scaled
Infrastructure to meet rapid growth
80%
Of infrastructure provisioning is automated to deliver infrastructure services faster and at a lower cost
Combell hosts one-third of the websites in Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg, and is planning for phenomenal growth as it expands across Europe. When the company launched in 1999, it offered basic website hosting and domain name registration. In 2019, Combell merged with TransIP and Register Group.
Combell operates 10 data centers throughout Europe and provides hosted Microsoft Office 365 and managed services such as private cloud, infrastructure services, dedicated connectivity, business continuity, and IT advisory services.
Delivering exceptional network performance and reliability is central to Combell’s customer promise. The company needed to ensure that it had a reliable, scalable network infrastructure to uphold its money-back guarantee while supporting rapid expansion. Combell switched to Juniper Networks to take advantage of the simplicity and sophistication of Juniper’s portfolio of solutions.
“We want to provide the fastest and most reliable performance available,” says Arne Van Theemsche, network and Linux system engineer at Combell.
Juniper Networks MX480 Universal Routing Platform forms the heart of Combell’s network core, providing reliable, high-performance connectivity between its 10 data centers. Within those data centers, Combell uses Juniper Networks QFX10000 and QFX5000 lines of Ethernet switches for a very dense, highly scalable core network. Juniper Networks EX4600 Ethernet Switches provide 10GbE top-of-rack switching.
Having an open, scalable infrastructure was critical, so Combell deployed the Ethernet VPN-Virtual Extensible LAN (EVPNVXLAN) framework for agile, efficient connectivity within and across its data centers. EVPN/VXLAN decouples the physical underlay network from the virtual overlay, simplifying Layer 2/ Layer 3 connectivity between the servers deployed in Combell’s data centers while maintaining a consistent underlay architecture.
The agility that comes with an open, scalable infrastructure has allowed the company to grow rapidly, both organically and by successfully migrating customers from its acquisitions to its state-of-the-art infrastructure. “The Juniper network has helped us support our recent mergers because we can scale our network more efficiently,” Van Theemsche says.
Junos OS, the network operating system that runs across all Juniper routing, switching, and security platforms to provide a One Junos Experience, enables Combell to easily automate network configurations and operations to provision infrastructure services with streamlined precision and greater efficiency. “Junos OS is really advanced,” Van Theemsche says. “Automation is really important for efficient growth, and we can easily integrate our automation based on Python and Ansible with Juniper’s APIs and libraries.”
“Before adding automation, the time between when a person made the network request and the provisioning could take anywhere between one and eight working hours,” Van Theemsche says. “Today, it takes about one minute. The time we save is quite a big win for us.”
Backed by its parent company team.blue, Combell aims to expand across Europe while maintaining its goal to be best-inclass and maintain its focus on customers. “We want to be a digital enabler for businesses, and we will continue to turn to the most advanced technologies available,” Van Theemsche says.
“We want to be known for using the best and most innovative technologies across our network.” With an open, scalable Juniper infrastructure, Combell and team.blue can uphold its promise to millions of customers.
The Products
MX480
The SDN-enabled MX480 Universal Routing Platform offers unprecedented scale for service provider and cloud applications, enabling the delivery of advanced business and residential multi-service edge services. The MX480 Universal Routing Platform delivers 7.5 Tbps of system capacity that supports inline MACsec without performance penalties for 10/40/100 GbE interfaces. It is also a carrier-grade platform with extensive automation capabilities.
QFX network switches deliver industry-leading throughput and scalability, a comprehensive routing stack, the open programmability of Junos OS, and the broadest set of EVPN-VXLAN and IP fabric capabilities. Juniper offers a wide range of switches for data center spine and leaf switches, campus distribution and core, or data center gateway and interconnect.
EX4600
The EX4600 Ethernet Switch offers a compact, highly scalable, high-performance 10GbE solution for enterprise campus distribution deployments as well as low-density data center top-of-rack environments.
Published March 2020