Xigen

Xigen is a full-service digital design and marketing agency specialising in e-commerce. Founded in 2000, the company is headquartered in Bedfordshire with over fifty staff around the world. The team designs and develops a range of sites across Magento, Wordpress and other platforms.

Before using OVHcloud, Xigen was using a number of different hosting providers including international hyperscalers for larger projects and a variety of UK-based firms. However, each host offered different capabilities and configuration options, and the team was keen to find a standardized solution to make configuration more consistent and flexible.

Xigen designs and develops sites for a number of well-known brands, so resilience and reliability is critical. At the same time, clients frequently need changes made to their sites as projects evolve, so the Xigen team needed a solution that was flexible enough to adapt and scale without any significant downtime.

“We’d started to look at colocation options.”

“We knew that there were options out there where we could get far more flexibility, power and resiliency for our clients. At the same time, although the smaller hosts were fairly straightforward, other providers could be quite opaque when it came to understanding cost. We’d already used OVHcloud for some bare metal servers and decided to investigate further.”

Mark Fitzsimmons, CTO at Xigen.

The Xigen team chose OVHcloud’s hosted private cloud solution running VMware Virtual Cloud Director (VCD) on vSphere, as well as a number of bare metal STOR servers for storage, running TrueNAS as a backup solution. The environment runs on vRack, and Xigen has a fully private 2Gb/s network, which means that all infrastructure including the bare metal and hosted private cloud servers is effectively in the same private network. The team can use the VMware NSX VPN to access all the servers, regardless of their location, and deploy content to the new servers quickly and easily. Although Xigen does not have direct control over its cloud server locations, after consultation with the local team this was set to OVHcloud’s Erith datacentre in the UK to ensure low latency. Xigen also uses a range of other cloud solutions and IP addresses depending on client needs.

The Xigen team now has access to a fully managed VMware suite without the burden of routine management and maintenance that would come with a dedicated server, including patching and software updates. However, OVHcloud’s solution gives the team root access, enabling them to dynamically manage the size of the virtual machines to best suit their customers.
“The new VMware solution gives us a vast amount of flexibility,” continued Fitzsimmons. "If we want to work on a site, the backup solution can clone an image of the production server in minutes. We can make changes or fix any performance issues away from the production site, re-uploading it when we’re done, with minimal downtime. Similarly, we quite often need to activate virtual machines for build servers, which is quite a CPU-intensive process. With OVHcloud, we can automate it, running the CICD process and shutting it down immediately afterwards, avoiding unnecessary costs for the CPU usage.”

Furthermore, with OVHcloud, Xigen can scale servers easily, quickly adding new machines or additional storage as needed.

“The additional flexibility makes life much easier,” added Fitzsimmons. “I can click a button and within half an hour I’ve got 3TB of additional storage, and haven’t had to physically buy a disc and plug it in. OVHcloud has given us a highly available, highly customizable environment where we can evolve our technology to best meet the needs of our clients – without having to do too much routine maintenance.”

Mark Fitzsimmons, CTO at Xigen.

Xigen is still realizing the full power of VMware vSphere. For example, the team has a number of clients that run forums or support sites. These need to be run on servers which have PHP forum software installed, and as forums tend to be vulnerable to abuse, it is advantageous to have the forums on separate machines. Xigen’s new solution with OVHcloud means that they can use NSX Edge to route forum traffic to a different resource pool with separate virtual machines that can run PHP forum. “

We’ve also learned a great deal during the process,”

“For example, in our industry, we wouldn’t use bare metal servers for client projects because they can’t be recovered fast enough if something bad happens, like a motherboard breaks. With VMware, we have backup images generated every few minutes and can restore from them in around half an hour, rather than spending at least a day working out an issue with a bare metal server and then restoring an older image. It’s taken a bit of education and discussion with our clients to help them understand the benefits, particularly since the cost is a little higher, but it’s well worth it.”

Mark Fitzsimmons, CTO at Xigen.

In January 2023, VMware stopped supporting NSX-V and OVHcloud’s extended support ended in July 2024. As a result, the Xigen team migrated to NSX-T with the help of the OVHcloud team. Although NSX-T is a modern, more comprehensive platform with built-in container support, designed for multi-cloud, the migration was not without its challenges.

“The two platforms are just very different,”

“For example, we’d configured NSX-V to have firewalls between clients, which NSX-T can do as well, but during the migration re-configuring one could have had a knock-on effect on another. It was all ok in the end, but we had to be quite careful with rule setting. We also had an issue where all client IP addresses needed to be changed, but the migration had a set-back and all the addresses had to be changed again – so we had to inform all 250 customers that they had new IPs. It wasn’t anything catastrophic, but it wasn’t plain sailing either – but then few migrations are.”

Mark Fitzsimmons, CTO at Xigen.

Xigen is also now using VMware vRealize Operations Manager (VROPs) to keep the technical team updated on their virtual machine usage. This is primarily to ensure that they receive notifications when client partitions are running out of space. As a result, the team can add additional capacity and keep everything running as well as it should.

“By working with OVHcloud and VMware we’ve improved our ability to manage a complex technology estate, gaining considerable flexibility and scalability,” 

“It’s hard to estimate cost savings, but we’ve definitely made them, and have gained far greater cost transparency. The fast scaling of servers will also be a considerable asset, particularly for retail clients during events like Black Friday.”

“Over the last six months, we’ve had some internal changes, so have been looking to keep the technology stable,” 

“That said, we’ve always got a vision for the future and are looking at improving our hosting proposition later on; it would make our customers’ lives much easier if they could work with us for both development and hosting. Moving to OVHcloud has helped us to maintain our margins, as well as potentially developing new revenue streams, and we can keep customers happier by offering more flexibility, not to mention managing our own business technology more easily.”

Mark Fitzsimmons, CTO at Xigen.

"It's been a great process helping the Xigen team get the best possible infrastructure for their needs," 

 "Together we've made sure that they have the scalability, flexibility and resiliency to keep sites up and running optimally, as well as paving the way for growth. We're proud to be working with such an innovative organisation and look forward to a bright future together."

David Higbee, Partner Account Manager at OVHcloud.