Nexellent is a Swiss data centre services provider. Established in 2004, Nexellent believes it is a pioneer in offering pay as you grow services to business through the provision of flexible, modular and scalable services. These flexible offerings include server housing, colocation, disaster recovery and private cloud. Nexellent also offer flexible cloud services, including Platforms as a Service (PaaS), Software as a Service (Saas) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS).
Nexellents own data centres are not carrier-neutral. Nexellent maintains its own backbone network infrastructure which customers are expected to rent. Nexellent believes this is the key to heightened security and guaranteed bandwidths of up to 10GBPS. It certainly reduces the room for error when it comes to connectivity, but does also reduce choice. Network and internet options are also flexible and scalable and are configured to customers specific needs.
Nexellent data centres are compliant with FINMA banking regulations and are certified to ISO 9001 and 270001. They offer 24/7 system monitoring, site access and technical support and advanced early fire detection. All data centres offer at least N+1 redundancy throughout, including cooling, power and security. Geo-redundancy is also offered as standard across two data centres. For clients who take up server housing in shared racks, access to servers is supervised. Badge and fingerprint scanners prevent unauthorised access anywhere in its data centres.
Services provided by Nexellent are aimed at all sized of business, including the very small. Businesses can rent space for just one server in shared space through the server housing option. Larger businesses, or those growing out of shared space, can rent individual racks or private cages.
Location
Nexellent operate only in Switzerland. Its head office is located in Glattbrugg, in the Zurich region. Switzerland is not subject to any data sharing agreements with other countries or governments and remains completely neutral, even in the data centre industry.
It owns two data centres, one at head office in Glattbrugg, Opfikon and one in Zurich. The Glattbrugg is the bigger centre, with office space, suites and cages available. The Zurich centre is smaller and provides mainly server racks and shared housing.
Nexellent also rent 120 racks in Interxion, Zurich. Interxion was the data centre that Nexellent used to establish and grow its business from inception and it now occupies about 10% of the Zurich data centres available space.
Energy
Interxion, the base for many of Nexellents customers, provides 100% sustainable energy options in all of its data centres, including the Zurich one. It consistently strives to reduce carbon footprint and energy use, and to date acquires 90% of its total energy needs from sustainable sources.
In its own data centres, Nexellent implements a range of energy-efficient measures. These include charging separately for energy consumed, cold-corridors and choosing hardware that consumes less energy by design.
Funding/business model
Nexellent is a Swiss joint stock company (AG) with no public sources of funding.
Customers and partners
Nexellent cater to businesses in any industry, but do offer tailored services to clients in the IT, Finance, Government, Health, software and retail industries. Its client base is predominantly Swiss, although around 20% of its clients are from the US, UK, South Africa and Dubai.
Prominent Swiss clients include Switchplus, Lungenliga and Comsolutions. Amongst its international clients are Berenberg Bank, Interflora and Trans Data Management.
Nexellent also has a number of technology and service partners such as Interxion Data Centres, Citrix, VMWare, Microsoft and Cisco.
Flexibility and some great features, but not neutral
Nexellent caters well for businesses of all sizes. For smaller businesses that need data centre space in a FINMA compliant environment, Nexellent offer the perfect solution via its shared server housing service. For larger businesses, FINMA compliance, scalability and the benefits of Swiss neutrality are a compelling pull. With uptimes at 99.5% and geo-redundancy as standard, there are few reasons not to consider a Nexellent data centre.
There is one area where Nexellent doesnt match some other big data centre providers. The lack of carrier neutrality is ironic considering the significant amounts of flexibility that Nexellent offer throughout its service menu. For companies that arent bound to other providers, or who can benefit from the added layer of security that using in-house connectivity can offer; it could still be an attractive proposition. For others, the lack of competition and redundancy that multiple carrier options offer may just be a deal-breaker.