Background

With the Netherlands serving as one of the two data center hotspot areas of Europe, the country occupies an important position in the cyber world. The Netherlands thus attracts many multinational companies and hundreds of business data centers.

In recent years, Netherlands data center operator Serverius has grown rapidly. The company is ranked among the top five data center providers in the Netherlands and has served more than 2,000 enterprise customers worldwide.

To maximize data center reliability, Serverius built the equipment rooms of its two data centers above sea level — a significant advantage in a country where a third of the land is below sea level. This precaution increased construction and operation costs, but Serverius is dedicated to high-availability services. The company also has a remote disaster recovery center, which greatly improves disaster prevention and backup reliability. For interconnected network services, Serverius’ two data centers directly connect to the European backbone nodes, Amsterdam and Frankfurt, to provide efficient and fast transmission services.

Challenges

Serverius had become increasingly concerned about DDoS attacks, especially after a large-scale DDoS attack in 2013 interrupted Spamhaus anti-spam services, slowing down network access in Europe for a week. Since 2013, Serverius data centers had been attacked almost every day. O&M personnel were busy handling burst network attack events. As a result, they were working overtime, and O&M costs increased. In addition, service interruptions led to customer complaints and losses.

When Serverius analyzed the relationship between lost customers and network security events, the analysis result showed that every lost customer had suffered network attacks. One lost customer with annual sales above 1,000,000 Euros experienced multiple DDoS attacks within a month.

Solution

To resolve the problem, Serverius communicated with well-known industry peers and found that data center operators whose operating revenues increased rapidly in recent years were implementing a security value-added service. This service protected customer service continuity even in the face of frequent security events and improved competitiveness for the data center operators. In the Netherlands, however, fewer than 15% of data center operators were implementing security operating services, and the service quality was uneven.

Serverius decided to implement security protection and operating solutions with the following options:

• A ‘customizable’ solution that combines basic protection and operable functions that could be integrated quickly into the Serverius operating platform.
• An ‘effective protection’ solution that could be enabled and scheduled as required, without affecting user services. Protection policies could be customized and refined based on customer or application needs.
• A ‘scalable and schedulable’ solution that reduces O&M costs.

Serverius uses a self-developed operating platform toolbox to schedule and configure servers, networks, and services as well as generate reports. The new security protection solution had to be integrated quickly into the platform and managed by the toolbox. The security solution involved multiple security protection layers, including network, application, and data security. Each layer requires a unique security solution and O&M skills. Anti-DDoS was a necessity. 

After evaluating several anti-DDoS vendors, Serverius chose the Huawei AntiDDoS Solution for its flexible deployment mode, powerful protection performance, and accurate protection capabilities. The Huawei solution uses per-packet in-depth detection technology and a unique Big Data analysis platform algorithm to establish traffic models in more than 60 dimensions. The solution can quickly respond to slight changes in any dimension.

In addition, this solution integrates global IP reputation and fingerprint identification technologies to quickly respond to various types of DDoS attacks. The solution’s open APIs enabled fast interconnection with the Serverius management platform, meeting Serverius’ requirements for customized operation.

Benefits

A year after deploying the Huawei AntiDDoS Solution, Serverius data centers were spending much less time handling burst security events. The data protection report shows that in this first year, the Huawei AntiDDoS Solution successfully defended against DDoS attacks more than 40,000 times, and the peak attack traffic exceeded 200 Gbit/s. The success of this solution is helping Serverius grow in both user business and profits.

Serverius CEO Gijs van Gemert observed, “Using the Huawei AntiDDoS Solution, Serverius has successfully entered the management security service market and achieved good results. The Huawei AntiDDoS Solution provides a high-performance API. After being rapidly integrated with our management platform toolbox, the API implements automatic management and report functions. Currently, the DDoS traffic mitigation service has become one of the three major services of Serverius.”