The Russian-based marketplace Ozon continues to expand its IT infrastructure installation at IXcellerate’s MOS5 data centre in Biryulyovo (South Campus). The relationship between the companies dates back to 2022 when a tender process looked at facilities that belonged to five data center providers. The marketplace contracted IXcellerate for some 175 racks to co-locate its own server hardware, and the installation is steadily growing.
Hardware or Cloud?
The marketplace has long opted for in-house infrastructure because the option of using public cloud services does not meet its needs in terms of control, flexibility and customization settings.
Ozon’s IT infrastructure integrates more than 7,600 servers and comprises various systems and services, including a mobile app and a website, ERP, CRM, WMS, etc. Growing fast, the company needs to keep upgrading and scaling up its IT capabilities. Having looked at all the pros and cons of the available options, Ozon’s management bet the farm on the colocation model and decided to move its hardware to commercial data centres. Because of the marketplace’s high visitor traffic and 24/7 availability requirement, all IT load needed to be spread across several sites so that the service remains online should any of them go down.
Data Center selection criteria
The key requirements for a provider were as follows:
- scalability within the location: the company had to change facility a number of times due to the fact that its DC provider was running out of available rack space;
- Tier III or higher certification with minimal downtime;
- High-dense racks with a peak load of 10 kW;
- Round-the-clock access for the customer’s engineers to the equipment in the data hall;
- Excellent connectivity and presence of multiple telecom providers on the site;
- The provider’s reputation and VIP customer base,
- Flexible payment terms.
Why IXcellerate?
The MOS5 data centre met all of the customer’s criteria and had available facilities in the scope required by Ozon. Similar to other IXcellerate DCs, this facility is built to the latest standards for power usage and cooling, which makes it possible to host high-performance computers with a load of up to 30 kW and provide as much redundancy as possible.
To date, Moscow has only a few data centres that are capable to offer such powerful colocation solutions. These capabilities in conjunction with reliability metrics make IXcellerate’s data centres stand head and shoulders over the competition. The company’s SLA guarantees up to 99.982% uptime: its customers experienced zero downtime over the 10 years it’s been in operation. Apart from its technological advantages, IXcellerate’s quotation offered the best balance among other tenders.
«We are a digital company and growing at a tremendous pace year on year. This correspondingly increases the load on all IT systems, so we seek to build up our infrastructure and accordingly scale our presence at the data centre without any limitation. After several migrations, we were looking for a reliable provider that was in a position to support our long-term growth, and we found IXcellerate. A year down the road we are happy with own choice».
Anton Stepanenko, chief technology officer, Ozon
Colocation terms and conditions
According to the SLA, IXcellerate guarantees 2N power redundancy at rack level and N+1 cooling redundancy installation-wide. The temperature is maintained within the range of +18 to +27 degrees. Infrastructure monitoring is provided 24/7. Ozon’s engineers have full access to the equipment. Technical support is provided via the customer portal; a response to Ozon’s request is provided within 5 minutes on the average.
Ozon’s first installation at MOS5 was set up in 2022, and more capacity has been added regularly in line with the customer’s business growth. The next expansion and procurement of servers are scheduled for May 2024.
«We always try to stick to our construction plans and the promises we give to our customers despite all the turbulence around. One hundred per cent commitment to the quality and reliability level is our core business principle. No matter who uses our colocation services – a small company or a giant corporation – they must always be confident that our data centers will provide premium service and scalability for IT resources as they grow and digitize operations.».
Andrei Aksenov, general director of IXcellerate