Customer Spotlight: Onavo improves performance and reduces costs with bare-metal cloud

As the expert in mobile data savings, Onavo creates a suite of award-winning data utility apps that help users manage their mobile data usage, protect themselves from malware and save money. With more than one million users around the world, Onavo relies on high network speed and superior performance to provide the best quality experience for consumers.

In this customer spotlight, Galed Friedmann, Head of Operations at Onavo, discusses how the move to bare-metal servers allowed them to increase performance without sacrificing the automation and flexibility of the cloud.

Q: When you started researching solutions, what were your requirements?

A: To provide quality service to our growing customer base, we needed high network speed and reliable server performance with a stringent SLA for guaranteed uptime. We also required a predictable cost approach to keep expenses under control.

Internap’s bare-metal cloud helped us meet network and performance goals using dedicated physical servers that could be scaled up and down like a traditional virtual cloud based on workload needs. We utilize bare metal in Internap’s data center locations in New York and Amsterdam to support our global users, and can provision physical servers within 24 hours in most cases using Internap’s self-service customer portal.

Q: What changes have you noticed since the move to bare-metal servers?

A: Our move from a virtual cloud environment to dedicated physical servers has led to a boost in performance. Bare-metal servers with no virtualization layer allow us to take advantage of the full processing capacity of the physical servers, which let us reduce our overall server count. With better performance and more control over our server usage, costs are more predictable.

Also, our NOC is now able to focus on business-critical issues instead of infrastructure maintenance and troubleshooting. We have fewer unexpected outages and less need for constant network monitoring, which makes it easier to provide customers with fast, reliable access to their mobile data applications.
Internap’s SLA supports 100% network availability across multiple networks, which takes this additional burden off our support personnel.

We are regularly testing, developing and adding new products, and the ability to self-provision new physical servers and delete instances when finished gives us the flexibility we need. As our business grows, it’s important for us to have these automation capabilities along with better performance.