Heficed

Learn how Deft acts as this service provider’s service provider for Data Center MigrationColocation, and Network Connectivity services.

Heficed was carefully built to change the way companies and government organizations order, lease, deploy, and manage IP addresses.

 

INDUSTRY
Hosting
LOCATIONS
Toronto, CA
New York, US
Reston, US
Atlanta, US
Chicago, US
Dallas, US
Los Angeles, US
Sunnyvale, US
Seattle, US
São Paulo, BR
Amsterdam, NL
London, UK
Frankfurt, DE
Johannesburg, ZA
Singapore, SG
Hong Kong, HK
Tokyo, JP
Sydney, AU
CUSTOMER SINCE
2015

What one service provider needs from another

There’s nothing better than the respect of our peers. That’s why there’s nothing more humbling to us than being chosen as a service provider’s service provider.

We work hard to understand and match the level of care our service provider customers promise to their own customers. So when global hosting and networking provider Heficed (formerly known as Host1Plus) approached us, we welcomed the opportunity.

Heficed serves power users of Linux or Windows-based services — the kind who require APIs, intuitive UIs, and powerful, on-demand resources. We sat down for a conversation with Heficed CTO Aistis Zenkevicius to learn more about what service providers look for in other service providers.

Q: Please introduce yourself.

I’m Aistis Zenkevicius, CTO of Heficed. I’ve been in technical jobs for 20+ years, with a keen interest in the Infrastructure as a Service field.

As the CTO at Heficed, I guide the infrastructure team, sharing my know-how in areas spanning from storage system design and virtualization to system monitoring.

I also organize the entire development life-cycle, performing day-to-day project management and defining product roadmaps.

Q: Why was Heficed looking for a new infrastructure provider?

Our customers expect and require our infrastructure to always be available. So having a partner that understands what “always-on” means was critical.

The most important business challenge we had to solve was finding top-notch Remote Hands staff manning our critical infrastructure 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

We have yet to find another infrastructure provider with as high a level of professionalism as Deft.

Q: What changed with your previous provider?

We were unable to control which transit providers we could use or how we could grow our rack space.

Deft was the first data center in the U.S. that moved from a pay-per-use model to allowing fully owned rack space, power, and compute. So we jumped at the opportunity to be more strategic and forward-thinking.

Q: What technological challenges did you need to solve?

They were really core infrastructure challenges — power consumption per rack and available connectivity.

At Heficed, we tend to use high power-density compute Colocation. We consume a traditional data center rack power cap at half the rack capacity. It’s not efficient — technically or financially.

We were looking for a partner who could deliver the power quality and density that we needed.

Q: What convinced you Deft could help you hit these goals?

We’re a service provider — we knew we needed another service provider capable of meeting the same standards that we promise our customers.

Things like having a Network Operations Center in-house, having smart people on the floor around the clock, and making the effort to deeply understand our business were critical.

Deft also had good locations, good power pricing, blended connectivity, and best-in-class Remote Hands.

When you meet an organization that understands the needs of service providers, and is ready, willing, and able to support them, you know you’ve found the right partner.

Working with the Deft team, we were able to get racks with 8 kW (or more) of available power. Most importantly, we have real-time visibility into our power consumption per rack in the Deft portal. We’re then able to connect this information with our own internal system monitoring and control compute node power consumption by tuning CPU performance.

Deft also gave us the option to merge our multi-rack power commit into a single pool as needed, which greatly simplified our footprint management and expansion.

In addition to allowing us to control our costs, Deft provides us with blended, redundant traffic and redundant links that deliver a true 100% SLA on connectivity.

Q: Tell us about the data center migration process.

Well, we got more than we expected. Kudos to Deft!

The Deft team worked with us and took our needs to heart as though they were part of Heficed. They proactively created a rack diagram and performed our entire installation without a hiccup.

The team at Deft has also saved us a lot of time by providing the required network and power cabling for us.

We’ve been pleasantly surprised by how quickly and efficiently Deft staff addresses our requests and concerns.

Q: What does the next year hold for Heficed?

As mundane as it sounds, our goal is to capitalize on our cloud product and crystalize our client base. Global political instability, currency fluctuations, and hardware component shortages (e.g. RAM modules) all put stress on our business. They add unpredictability, and unpredictability leads to indecisiveness in the market.

To help differentiate Heficed in the crowded hosting area, we’re working on new and unique networking products.

Deft’s geographical locations and available transit providers on site help us to achieve those goals.

Contact us about starting your own project

Deft, a Summit company

Deft, a Summit company
2200 Busse Rd.
Elk Grove Village, IL 60007
+1 (312) 829-1111