EmXcore podcast Episode 6: Talking about the difference between public cloud and private cloud and about building private clouds abroad

In this episode we are talking to Diederik Wennekes from Trans-iX about the difference between public cloud and private cloud and about building private clouds abroad and on a somewhat different location, more specific a ship.

Lisa:
Hi everyone and welcome to another episode of the EmXcore podcast, a podcast where we will invite customers, partners or anyone of whom we think has something interesting to say or has some interesting views on the internet and networking industry.

Today we are talking to Diederik Wennekes from Trans-iX about the difference between public cloud and private cloud and about building private clouds abroad and on a somewhat different location, more specific a ship.

Hey, Diederik welcome to the podcast. Really glad that you could join us today. Can you tell us a little bit about who you are what you do?

But for the moment it helps me a lot to understand the questions from the customers. And I know what is possible from a technical point of view. So for me, it’s easy to switch between the roles in the board meetings and meetings with the technical guys.

Lisa:
Nice. I think Trans-iX started as a hosting company originally, right?

Diederik:
Yeah.

Lisa:
Cool. But you also started doing private cloud now?

Diederik:
Yeah, we started 21 years ago with web hosting and then the markets went to cloud. And we joined.We also have a pretty big automation for Windows workspaces. And our bases grew from the simple web hosting to the more complex environments, for example, the cloud, public clouds, private clouds, and everything in between.
We design almost everything, we can build it for you and maintain it 24/7.

Lisa:
Okay, cool. Yeah. And you said you also do the maintaining? Is that like a standard service that you provide? Do you do have a standard offering for that? Or can you really see per customer what kind of services you offer?

Diederik:
We are really flexible in what we can deliver, for example, the hypervisor, we can do Hyper-V, we can do VMware, or KVM proxmox. It doesn’t really matter for us. We know the pros and cons of every hypervisor, one is easier to install or more expensive or less expensive if you need more people to maintain it. We prefer Hyper-V for our own platforms, because we have the biggest team for that. But we have teams for Windows, Linux, security, networking. So we can talk on all levels.

Normally we build it for customers, but we also get requests when you already have a running cloud environment. And we can maintain it as well. And do so. We do some maintenance on Public clouds, Azure, Amazon, Google, if it’s needed.

Lisa:
Okay. So you have a little bit of both worlds.

Diederik:
Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Lisa:
And what would you say is the biggest difference between, like what customers want with a public cloud or the private cloud?

Diederik:
Good question.

Lisa:
Like the biggest benefit of being on your private cloud.

Diederik:
The biggest benefits for public clouds is the accessibility they can really deploy really fast levels of, most development companies like to deploy in Amazon because it’s so easy. You don’t really need ops to it start out. But to have more control over your data, your security and your customer, of course, it’s still better to have a private cloud.

To have more control over your data, security and your customers, it is still better to have a private cloud

Diederik:
Quick explanation for what we call private clouds. The msp ‘s in Holland, for example, call them private cloud if the hardware is there. So you can buy some resources that we call private cloud, because it’s your own hardware we are buying and we built it for you. So it’s private cloud for your company.

Lisa:
And do you also have specific brands or specific hardware you use or you advice? Or can customers figure out what they want by themselves as well?

Diederik:
We do have some preferences, there are some brands you might not want to build on. But then again, if some people really want to pay 100 Euro less, instead of 100 Euro more, it’s all part of what we can do. We have some customers that have their own hardware they have their own connections with their hardware suppliers.

But also the storage devices has a really big difference in what you want. You can do hyper converged, Ceph, Net-App, we have Compellent older versions Ecologic, and power storage a current one, I believe. And everything in between.

We have some people that have open source storage devices that just have a lot of big disk and they want to use that that’s okay with us. Most of those projects, we work along the current IT person, so our current technical people inside the company. I would just ask them, what’s your preference? What do you like? And then again, like hyperviser we would just do the pros and cons. Not only cost, also speed and technology, an what is the lifespan of that hardware? We are really flexible in that in that part.

Lisa:
In terms of development, because of course last year with with COVID lots of things changed people started doing more and more online and more from home and needed more cloud solutions and more online solutions. Did you notice that there was a bigger, how do you say that, growth in demand on those kinds of services as well.

Diederik:
The biggest demand was working from home, but mostly 365 for Google, plus more end users that needed to replace her presence. We did a lot of migrations to that. Those kinds of platforms. However at the moment as COVID hopefully goes away that will be less. But you do see a lot of customers that moved last year, and looking around like was that the best choice for us.

Of course, the biggest question is is our data safe? There’s a lot of questions around that for the ownership of the of the big clouds. And we see a growing concern on that area. So for the coming year or two we do believe there will be a bigger demand for private clouds. We have the experience to migrate to our private environment. But then again, if you have teams for 365, it works and you don’t mind data security it’s easy to use, because you don’t have a really good alternative to run it on your own hardware. We can also make combinations for hybrid solutions.

Public clouds can be really useful for, for example, short/large data sets. Not for stuff that you need to run 24/7.
One of the biggest questions I got, they say we want 100 or 1000 workspaces and during the day we need 800 or 900 when during the night only 20 if you can start up in a public cloud that’s much cheaper. But 100 permanently online then it’s less costly to run it in a private cloud.

Lisa:
I can imagine as well if if there’s an issue or if you want something a private cloud might be easier to get in contact with yopu guys than if you were at a big public cloud.

Diederik:
Yeah that is what is the added value for a company such as us, is that if you want to call Microsoft you pay 400 euros an hour.

Lisa:
That much?

Diederik:
Yeah, I think that is still the current cost, but they’ll just say “Can you turn it off and on again.” We can do that same for less cost. Like I said, our added value is to help the customer build a stable platform so they can continue growing their business or stabilizing their business.

Our added value is to help the customer build a stable platform so they can continue growing and stabilizing their business

Lisa:
Well in the end that’s what you want as a company of course.

Diederik:
Especially non technical customers that don’t really care about how it works, it just needs to work because it is just a small fraction of what they do. And they rather talk to somebody around the corner, then somebody on the other side of the world.

Lisa:
And then somebody knows what you’re talking about and, and which customer you are. That personal touch is also something we value a lot.

So what is the next step for Trans-iX? what is stuff you would like to expand or grow in as a company? What is next?

Diederik:
What’s next? That’s a good question. It’s always a good question. The current market is in Holland okay. We do have enough, well never enough, customers, but there are customers that still need our help. There are a lot of big fish that might form a threat in the future, like Amazon, like Microsoft’s. We are not really scared of them. But Holland is small, if you can say that, limited in a lot of competition. So we’re looking to rest of Europe, maybe even beyond that. We do have experience with deploying private clouds in different countries like Singapore, Brazil, America, Dubai, Sweden. And also deploying on marine, how do you call it.. We also built private clouds for ships.

We also built private clouds on ships

Lisa:
Okay, cool. Wauw, that’s really cool. I can imagine if you build it on a ship, there might be some issues or some trick points probably. And in general, when you build in a different location, or a location that is not based in the Netherlands, what are the big issues that you come across?

Diederik:
In datacenters abroad we mostly send the hardware to the data center itself, maybe send an engineer or the customer as an engineer on site. They will add everything to racks, turn it on, and we can do the rest remote.

For the ocean transport, it’s a little bit more difficult, because they have a really short window when they’re docked. So sometimes we just hear it a few days before and we need to fly to China. And because the boats are only two weeks in the docks we have to hurry up. One of the fun things there is if you are not done on time they will leave.

Lisa:
With you on it? That doesnt matter

Diederik:
Yes haha They won’t send a helicopter. Well so far we were okay. We prepare everything here, ship it over there. We lock it in and test it and then go away. They do have a lot of huge penalties if they stay too long.
So those are some fun projects.

We do built not only other public clouds, but also some private foreign countries where they already have a local private cloud at the local resellers and we can build on that. But for the future we are starting a program to have some more external sales companies or resellers to help us get more leads for international customers, for example Europe.

We currently are able to deploy in all Interxion data centers, if needed. But if it’s Equinix we can build in Equinix, we do have the connections. We’re searching for those resellers that can help us expand abroad. We don’t have a large sales team and we rather have other people help us with the proposition.

Lisa:
Yeah and it helps as well to have local people, who knows maybe the differences in the market and the culture. So that’s always pretty helpful. If anybody is listening that’s like, “Oh, you know what I can help maybe help them out.” contact Diederik.

Diederik:
Yeah, my Dutch is okay, my English is pretty good. My German is okay, but not that good. I tried to learn French last year, and that’s not my…

Lisa:
it didn’t didn’t go well.

Diederik:
No I have other specialties than language. But working with local resellers would help us a lot. We have the technology. We have the patience to help and learn people how to use stuff. For example, if an IT-company has the ability to maintain it themselves, but not the quality to build it we can just turn over the keys and tell them, “well if you need more help just give us a sign and we’ll help.”

Lisa:
Well I think that’s a big plus as well that the flexibility is there. So you can always search for a solution.

I think we talked a little bit about it as well, but if you have have to install a new private cloud abroad is that something you would do yourself? Do you send people there or do you use technicians from those countries? How would you do that?

Diederik:
It depends. We can send our own people, of course. But in the end, hardware is hardware right? You just have to make sure it doesn’t break when you screw it into the racks. Most of the data centers already have some people locally where you can just say “we want it this way” and ask for photos or have a live webcam so we can tell you where to plug it in.

Because in the end, it’s a lot cheaper than sending one or two people to the other side of the world and a lot faster off course. Sure we can fly that’s no problem. Well, maybe it depends on the situation, but normally we can.

Lisa:
Well Diederik, thank you a lot for joining the podcast.

Diederik:
No problem.

Lisa:
Thank you very much.

And for everyone listening. Thank you for listening to this episode. Please let us know what you thought about it or if you have any suggestions for the next episode, hopefully until the next one!