June 25, 2009 – 11:32 am
Rozmic Wireless, a global provider of email spam and virus protection has cut its operational costs and increased the efficiency and flexibility of its emailcloud service by deploying Arjuna Agility™. Agility dynamically manages Rozmic’s infrastructure, creating a single private cloud of in-house resources, from over 50 servers in two data centres, and allowing seamless integration with EC2, to deliver scalable capacity in line with customer demand.
Rozmic’s software-as-a-service offering, emailcloud, is a fully managed email service that scans and removes unwanted email before it reaches the customer network, saving bandwidth, time and eliminating the irritation of personal spam management.
emailcloud was originally built using Amazon Web Services and deployed on EC2 to create a highly scalable infrastructure. This early design allowed Rozmic to immediately roll-out a powerful offering that could scale in line with customer demand without the need for capital spend on hardware requirements. The service, launched in 2007, grew beyond all expectations and within 18 months had over 900 customers and 5 trade partners. Indeed, as emailcloud ’s popularity grew, a standard baseline of demand became established and the fundamental economics of outsourcing the infrastructure to EC2 began to change.
Rozmic soon realised that it would be more cost-effective in the long run, to support the base load using in-house infrastructure and use EC2 to accommodate demand spikes. The company therefore transitioned to internal infrastructure in late 2008 with two data centres in Newcastle and Liverpool housing over 50 servers. Managing this new infrastructure was initially achieved using a cloud platform developed in-house.
However, as demand continued to climb through early 2009 and Rozmic announced its intentions to add new datacentres in Dublin, Edinburgh and Texas, the company considered alternative solutions for the management of its cloud based infrastructure and chose Agility. Agility, is a non-invasive, ‘Federated Cloud Computing Platform’ that delivers the benefits of Cloud Computing through a truly novel design. Agility enabled Rozmic to transform its internal infrastructure into a Private Cloud of resources and to seamlessly integrate with EC2. Agility ’s container-based model delivers automated deployment and life-cycle management for Rozmic’s whole application stack. Business policy, which is now centralised and automated, is used to specify business requirements in the form of service agreements. Agility then monitors all service agreements, dynamically adapting the system to satisfy any changes in demand and ensuring all business requirements are constantly met.
Rozmic CEO Ross Cooney says: “We’re amazed at the flexibility and cost advantage that Agility has given us. We’re now able to offer our services to larger customers, without any provisioning concerns, knowing that we can elastically scale and shrink capacity to cope with demand and guarantee that service levels are met through Agility.”
The infrastructure makeover will also deliver future benefits for Rozmic. Agility’s federation capabilities will allow Rozmic to federate multiple cloud providers at the touch of a button. This will create further opportunities for the company to improve its value proposition to customers as operating costs and service levels can be improved by switching between cloud providers with the most compelling offer. It also combats the threat of cloud vendor lock-in.
Ross is convinced that Agility will help to keep Rozmic ahead of the game. “It’s a game-changing technology. Not only does it address the technical issues which enable system flexibility but it also ensures that the system is controlled by business level decisions. So, you benefit through reduced cost, increased flexibility and centralised control. You get an automated system that can dynamically respond to change but you also get to retain very fine grained control over how your specific service is delivered.”
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We all know that the phrase Cloud Computing is heavily abused by technology companies. Due to its broad definition it can be applied to a huge array of technology products and services. Many companies have simply re-invented themselves as ‘cloud’ providers by adding the badge to their existing services in the same way that whole industries have jumped on the ‘green’ bandwagon. Cloud Computing can be used to describe a very wide area of activity from SaaS to IaaS through PaaS, a huge array of activity. 
The Rozmic Hosted Exchange service is a hosted enterprise messaging solution based on Microsoft
