Helping hospitality improve earnings and customer satisfaction

The challenge

High-availability hybrid solution needed to connect disparate systems and maintain uptime

Onyx CenterSource delivers end-to-end, cloud-based payment services to its hospitality customers. The company’s three locations in the U.S., Norway and Spain led to disparities in technology architecture which led to connectivity and data-sharing challenges.

To address this issue and ease its management responsibilities, Onyx wanted to unify its systems under a single provider, while keeping each workload in its country of origin. Onyx also needed a hybrid solution that met the stringent service level agreement (SLA) requirements of its clients, while offering a more cost-effective environment for its other workloads. This solution also needed to provide the availability, security and resiliency to allow Onyx’s customers to have uninterrupted access to its applications.

The solution

Multi-tenant and single-tenant environment with HPC – Advanced Access balance SLA requirements and costs

Flexential offered the comprehensive solution Onyx required to meet its diverse IT needs. Utilizing Flexential’s cloud nodes in its Allentown, PA and Amsterdam data centers, Flexential allowed Onyx to consolidate its operations under a single provider umbrella, while supporting both its U.S. and overseas activity.

Flexential also integrates single-tenant and multi-tenant cloud environments. While the bulk of its workloads reside in the more economical multi-tenant cloud, Onyx’s relational database vendors require a dedicated environment. To support its core systems, Onyx also deploys a single-tenant footprint in the Allentown facility.

These environments are connected by Flexential’s 100 Gbps network backbone to ensure data can be quickly and seamlessly shared between the locations to provide access to the tools and data customers need to effectively coordinate payments.

While the single-tenant cloud met Onyx’s database vendors’ requirements, like all hosted virtual environments, it lacked visibility and control. This awareness was particularly important to minimize spend as Onyx frequently needs to ramp up and down large workloads for sandbox and load testing without incurring significant additional costs. To ensure it was optimizing its environment and minimizing its costs, Onyx wanted to be able to closely monitor and manage this environment.

Out of this need, Flexential built its HPC - Advanced Access product. While Flexential ensures the solution is compliant and secure up to the hypervisor level and provides ongoing management of the shared hypervisor, Onyx has full administrative control over the vCenter server so it can manage its workloads as if it were running in its own on-premise data center.

“Flexential’s Hosted Private Cloud allows us to closely manage our dedicated virtual environment to meet our licensing and scalability requirements while being economical,” said Jeff Hansell, Director, Technology Infrastructure at Onyx CenterSource. “This solution provides Onyx with optimal return on investment, allowing us to remain within our budget while delivering on the value our clients and partners expect.”

To deliver 100% uptime, Onyx leverages the Flexential Recovery Cloud, a disaster recovery-as-a-service (DRaaS) solution that offers rapid, secure recovery of data, applications and systems. Powered by Zerto’s IT Resiliency Platform. Recovery Cloud replicates data in near real-time between the Allentown and Amsterdam clouds to ensure data integrity and availability. If an outage occurs, Onyx can failover from one cloud to another to achieve the recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO) outlined in its customer contracts.

Flexential also provides a secure, compliant environment. The Allentown facility is HITRUST CSF and PCI DSS compliant, and Onyx utilizes dedicated firewalls and leverages Alert Logic, a managed detection and response (MDR) application, through Flexential to identify security threats and protect its environment. With a single set of firewalls and data center protections, Onyx also achieves a peace of mind that potential threats can be quickly identified, reported and mitigated.

The results

Resilient environment and commitment to partnership combine to deliver costeffective services that keep hospitality professionals connected

For Onyx, the true measure of success is anchored in three critical elements: the availability of the environment, its cost effectiveness and the partnership with Flexential.

The resiliency inherent in the Recovery Cloud ensures Onyx’s customers can coordinate commissions and perform other critical business activities without interruption.

Flexential also offers predictable, dependable technology costs that allow Onyx to accurately budget, year after year with no spikes or unexpected expenses. Flexential’s HPC – Advanced Access adds to this cost-efficiency, offering the insight and control to identify and maintain compliance with its relational database licensing requirements.

By managing the cloud and data center environments, Flexential frees up Onyx’s resources to focus on strategic projects. Flexential also provides multiple layers of support to build and foster a strong partnership. With a dedicated account team and tiered technical support to address increasingly complex issues, Flexential supports Onyx’s needs, allowing the company to maintain a smaller internal IT team. “I do not see us as a vendor-client relationship. I really see it as a partnership,” said Hansell. “That is very unique for us. The Flexential relationship is the example that I point to for other vendors to try to model.”

Flexential’s responsiveness and proactive communication also enriches the partnership. The creation of HPC – Advanced Access is one example of this flexibility and responsiveness. Today, this solution has been rolled across Flexential’s customers. Onyx also appreciates Flexential’s proactiveness in bringing new solutions to the table to help strengthen its IT operations. Recently, Flexential recommended its unified cloud platform to bring together its services to help balance cost and security with low-latency deployments.

By utilizing Flexential to meet its myriad of IT requirements, Onyx was able to roll out managed services globally to pull together its data and gain confidence in the consistency in which its cloud instances are secured, managed and operated.

“Being able to globalize with a standardized, virtual solution was a big win for us,” said Hansell. “I do not worry as much about having my managed service done in multiple data centers. Flexential supports both facilities. It helps strengthen our capabilities and decrease our costs relative to other options in the market.”