Forcepoint: A Partnership Success Story

Forcepoint is one of Kubus’ longest standing customers, with data centres in 28 different sites all over the world. Forcepoint provide their services to 12,000 corporations in 150 countries including airlines, banks, software companies, pharmaceuticals, and automotive manufacturers.

This year, Forcepoint decided it was time to consolidate their sites and reduce their operations to 17 sites globally. So, they came to us.

Data centres are all about delivering the largest amount of power and connectivity in the most efficient way possible. For this project they partnered with Digital Realty, one of the world’s largest providers of data centres, and we turned to Dell Technologies to supply the equipment.

Challenge 1 – The Equipment

“The biggest challenge with a project of this magnitude is scope” says Paul Bonner, the Technical Director at Kubus. “There was over £7million worth, and literally tonnes of equipment in play here, with a lot of that being legacy gear, some of which was getting close to it’s effective EOL. But the real heavy lifting on a job like this is deciding what to keep, what to replace and, critically, knowing Dell’s portfolio well enough to know what to replace it with. We reduced Forcepoint’s existing inventory of equipment of over 100 different SKUs, down to 8.”

“We reduced Forcepoint’s existing inventory of equipment of over 100 different SKUs, down to 8.”

Something that often gets overlooked on a project of this scale, is that when you buy 1000 servers from Dell, you’ll also get 1000 manuals, 1000 CDs, 1000 lots of cables and 1000 lots of cardboard inserts. We can significantly reduce the footprint of a project by consolidating the extra parts, the documentation and the packaging down to a minimum.

Why Dell?

We chose Dell’s R640 and R650 rack servers for this project because for every 5 old servers we take out, we can replace it with one new server, and we can still operate at about the same level of performance. That’s a 5 to 1 improvement on performance.

But it’s not just speed, Dell servers are cheaper to run as well. They use less power which means they require less cooling which means less money to run them each month.

They’ve got supported hardware and everything comes with a five-year support guarantee. “Dell is rock solid” says Paul, “and they’re easy to work with and extremely reliable.”

“Dell is rock solid. They’re easy to work with and extremely reliable.”

Challenge 2 – The Logistics

Logistics also played a huge part in this project. For equipment migrating from one data centre to another, the shortest distance between move locations was 2.5 miles, but the furthest distance was 861 miles between San Jose and Phoenix. We also shipped equipment from the UK to Singapore, South Africa, and Australia for full new data centre builds. The practicalities of getting large amounts of equipment across great distances played a huge role in the successful delivery of this project; Kubus’ in-house logistics experts are well versed in the customs requirements for shipping globally for these large kit deployments.

We ship to over 123 countries on an annual basis and manage it all in house. We can handle all the importation documentation and are able to offer DDP (Delivered at Place) shipping terms. Leveraging our partnerships with specialist IOR service providers we are also able to offer the customer IOR and EOR (Importer/Exporter of Record) services which is particularly useful for customers who do not have registered business entities within the destination country. This service allows a local customs agent to act on the customer’s behalf as the importer/exporter, handling all the required formalities and ensuring the customer receives the equipment at the right time, in the right place.

The Result – Savings

Data Centres cost a lot of money, with a typical DC cage costing ~£50k a month to run. With an overhaul like this recent project, where we were able to cut Forcepoint’s server numbers by a ratio of 5 down to 1, alongside optimising their networks and storage, we were able to save Forcepoint approximately 80% of those running costs.

The Result – Operation

We take pride in the environments we create; we make them look good and make sure they’re easy to navigate and maintain. Because it’s not us who’s going in there if there’s a problem down the line, it’s the people on site and they need to know where everything is.

Part of preparing the site for the client involves prestaging the equipment. This includes things like testing and configuring, labelling up all the management IP addresses for each server, and burn testing everything for 48hrs.

Pre-staging means that you won’t lose money on teams of technicians waiting around for broken, missing or damaged parts to be replaced. You can literally take the equipment out of the box, plug it in and start using it.

The Result – Performance

On the completion of this project, Forcepoint, despite downsizing from 28 to 17 data centres, will have potential to expand and add servers in the future. Ultimately, it’s their customers who will enjoy a better experience. The new equipment and networking performance offers an improvement in latency from 300 milliseconds to around 40 to 50 milliseconds.

So, if you’re wondering why a billion-dollar company in the US wants to deal with a small team of 60 people operating out of the Cotswolds?  It’s because we know the Dell portfolio inside out. We know the Forcepoint network inside and out because we helped design, build and deploy it. As testament to the work we have carried out so far, and the performance improvements realised, there are now a further 5 new data centres scheduled for next year and all Forcepoint have to do is tell us where they want them, and we’ll take care of the rest.