D-Link Case Study

D-Link Corporation was founded in March 1986 in Taipei as Datex Systems Inc. The company designs, develops, and manufactures networking solutions for both the consumer and business markets. Customers can use D-Link products to set up networks, for monitoring and storage, to stream media, and for mobile broadband connectivity. D-Link has global headquarters in Taipei, Taiwan and regional headquarters in California; 127 sales offices in 64 countries; and 10 global distribution centers serving 100 countries worldwide.

D-Link planned to launch a cloud-based service portal, mydlink Cloud Services, to enable customers to view, control, and share network-connected devices, (such as IP cameras and routers), and manage storage. The portal has an alert and notification service so customers can receive information from their IP cameras, even when not personally monitoring them. To achieve the best speed and lowest latency possible, D-Link wanted to distribute the infrastructure for the portal globally and deploy the service from locations in the United States, Europe and Asia. The company also wanted an efficient solution to manage peaks in customer usage without investing in traditional IT resources and paying for idle capacity.

After evaluating a variety of options, including physical datacenters and other cloud service providers, D-Link determined that Amazon Web Services (AWS) provided the best return from a cost-benefit perspective. “We can deploy capacity with maximum flexibility,” says Kevin Chen, Director of Cloud Platform and Device Development. “Our costs are controlled and transparent—we only pay for what we use.” D-Link uses Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute (Amazon EC2) instances to deliver its cloud service portal and mobile applications. “We estimate that using Amazon EC2 Reserved instances has reduced IT costs by approximately fifty percent,” says Chen.

According to D-Link, using Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) to send messages and notifications to clients has simplified its infrastructure architecture. “Amazon SES is designed to integrate with other AWS products like Amazon EC2, so we didn’t need to build an in-house email solution or license a third-party email service,” says Chen. “Furthermore, by using Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), we’ve been able to offload time-consuming database administration tasks, such as backup and recovery and security patches, to AWS, which gives our IT team more time to focus of improving the core functionality of the portal.”

D-Link is using AWS Regions in the United States, Asia Pacific (Singapore) Region, EU (Ireland) Region, and Asia Pacific (Tokyo) Region to deploy the mydlink portal. “The IT department simply takes an image of the United States deployment and replicates it to Asia and Europe. We can improve capacity utilization more quickly and, just as importantly, extend and deliver services to customers much more rapidly, by as much as 30 percent,” says Chen.

The process of migrating to AWS, from supplier selection to implementation, only took six weeks. “This approach would have been nearly impossible using a traditional data center,” says Chen. “With AWS, we don’t need to worry about hardware issues. We can just focus on software development to give our customers a better experience with their mydlink-enabled products.”