Royal Green Limited’s PaceCloud Solution provides new public cloud offering with F5

Bangladesh’s leading Internet Service Provider, Royal Green Limited, recently launched its new PaceCloud Hybrid cloud solution to offer Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) to its customers. Using F5’s comprehensive solutions, PaceCloud delivers uninterrupted, quality services on a secure and reliable platform.

Business Challenges

Since 2005, Royal Green Limited, Bangladesh’s leading Internet Service Provider, has been tirelessly working to ensure that customers have easy access to fast, seamless, and secure internet connectivity. The company is synonymous with providing reliable and uninterrupted service in Bangladesh.

Even with its state-of-the-art network, Royal Green Limited saw an opportunity to cater to the growing demand for greater agility so that Bangladeshi companies can better scale, increase productivity, and achieve faster go-to-market capabilities. The company’s objective was to help its customers achieve these benefits by launching a public cloud solution: PaceCloud.

PaceCloud would provide companies with increased flexibility and scalability through an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offering in the public cloud, eliminating the investment and capital costs associated with building their own data centers. Furthermore, an IaaS solution would reduce the need for a large IT staff to manage the day-to-day complexity of a secure, enterprise network.

“We see immense potential to better serve a large segment of our customer base that demands greater flexibility and agility in their IT infrastructure. Furthermore, it gives companies of all sizes an edge in driving local innovation at a highly competitive rate,” Qamrul Huda, CTO, PaceCloud said.

Solution

After evaluating many options, PaceCloud selected F5 Networks as its partner to architect and deploy this offering.

PaceCloud leveraged the F5 Better Bundle and Best Bundle Hardware, which includes the BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager, BIG-IP DNS, the BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager, BIG-IP Application Security Manager, and  BIG-IP Access Policy Manager, for the deployment.

One of the key concerns for PaceCloud is a robust IaaS offering that customers could rely on to withstand any kind of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks against the data centers. To address this, F5 deployed its BIG-IP Virtual Edition to provide a dedicated platform to host its Domain Name System (DNS) Services.  

Secure, scalable, and easily customizable for any kind of cloud environment, BIG-IP gives PaceCloud and its customers the flexibility to rapidly provision and consolidate application services on their existing servers.

The public cloud was also able to effectively support multi-tenancy using virtual routing domains, and logical separation of the traffic and configuration objects on a per-customer basis.

Furthermore, with the Cisco Cloud Center integration–one of the first Cisco Cloud Center installations done globally–PaceCloud provided automatic provisioning capabilities through the self-service customer portal on their website to offer load balancing and Web Application Firewall (WAF) as-a=-service to its customers.

“The potential for cloud services to drive local innovation to disrupt industries in Bangladesh is immense. PaceCloud is committed to playing a vital role in delivering on the promise of a public cloud that’s easy to maintain, secure, and reliable as part of our service excellence,” added Huda.

Benefits

A robust threat protection and load management system, coupled with the integration with the Cisco Cloud Center, ensured a seamless launch of the PaceCloud public cloud solution, offering users a secure environment and continuous uptime and availability. 

Comprehensive Protection

The deployment, which included F5’s BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM) and BIG-IP Application Security Manager (ASM), provided the tools necessary to ensure that PaceCloud’s infrastructure was protected against advanced threats.  

F5’s ASM protects web and mobile applications from malicious bots, safeguards credentials and prevents data theft, mitigates sophisticated threat campaigns, defends against DDoS attacks and protects APIs. With these measures, PaceCloud is able to improve continuous system uptime for its customers so they can confidently leverage the public cloud.

“Vast amounts of data and information go through our networks every second of every day, and F5’s tools have armed our systems and teams with effective and consistent security across workloads and environments that bolster the confidence and trust our customers have placed in us,” said Huda.

Intelligent Load Balancing and Seamless Integration with Cisco Cloud Center

F5’s BIG-IP Load Traffic Manager (LTM) and BIG-IP DNS appropriately divert all incoming traffic requests. F5’s BIG-IP DNS distributes DNS and user application requests based on business policies, data center and cloud service conditions, user location, and application performance. In parallel, the BIG-IP LTM enables easy deployment, management, and rapid and reliable delivery of applications with static and dynamic load balancing to eliminate single points of failure. This setup helps ensure effective management of all traffic and reduces service disruption for users.

Additionally, the Cisco Cloud Center, installed locally, allows for the centralized management of users and APIs, permitting access and management of workloads in multiple cloud environments. As the orchestration engine of the entire public cloud architecture, the Cisco Cloud Center integrated various components to the SDN fabric and provided the front-end customer portal, integrating with the billing system for a smooth user experience.

Reliable User Experience

Deploying F5’s solutions enabled PaceCloud to reduce the load on itsservers, which helped ensure continuous availability and a reliable user experience. This was achieved  throughintelligenttraffic management, , providing support for multi-tenancy using Virtual Routing Domains and minimizing system downtimes.

“We have managed to fundamentally transform and improve how customers use our services by identifying and tackling their pain points with F5’s solutions", said Huda.