Then, over 20 years ago, Levin started a full-service IT Company in Houston, Texas, using it to perfect the concept of the boutique IT business. Communicating with customers, building and maintaining networks, and good, solid customer service. Eventually he had around 10-15 customers, five employees, and was working out of his house. It was a small but efficient organization, very flexible, everything was monitored remotely, and he was delivering results to his client, making a real difference in their businesses..
The Beginning of Cloud Services
In the rapidly changing world of technology, Levin soon realized he was going to have to get his head ‘in the cloud.’ In 2012 he was working on a job for a mortgage broker client and was introduced to VMware and virtualization. He understood the concept, but had never worked with the technology before. He hired someone knowledgeable about VMware to assist him on the project and to teach him the ropes.
Learning quickly, he saw the wave of the future. But, to his surprise, the small to medium business market was slow to accept virtualization, and that’s when the wheels started turning. His server room was an area in his garage, so he first virtualized the servers he had in there…and it worked. Levin soon had three severs running on $150 motherboard and recognized the portability of the technology, as it was not tied to any hardware. The network was cost effective, versatile, and easy to rescale.
With this realization, Levin started virtualizing his clients’ networks and a whole new service model was born. A year or so into that he started hearing about desktop virtualization, which was almost non-existent at the time. He had played around with desktop variations but didn’t like the performance on small business server hardware.
Levin began to understand the economics of what was beginning to be called the cloud. Less hardware, less electricity, less air conditioning, less space. Rapid scaling with minimum hardware and a lower cost of maintenance. But that still wasn’t the full picture of what was coming.
From the Garage Sale to Next Generation Internet Computing
Then, in December of 2012, Levin meets a gentleman at a neighborhood garage sale who works for a major, rural phone company provider. They get to talking and the man extends an offer for Levin to visit his company. The man also says they have extra data center capacity and are looking for some way to generate revenue from it.
About a week later, much to Levin’s surprise, the same man calls him with an invitation to tour his company’s facility. Levin decides he’ll take the guy up on his offer to tour and, as one thing leads to another. he and the phone company start working on a deal. Basically, Levin would use their facility to house his whole virtual environment and he would resell their extra data center capacity for them.
Unfortunately, after six months planning, the phone company backed out. They did not believe that selling virtual infrastructure as a service from a data center was profitable. Initially, Levin felt like they had wasted his time. However, he quickly realized he now had the entire strategy and structure planned out and that he needed to create his first private cloud. It included a new feature, desktop virtualization.
He thought, “What if I took out a loan and bought the hardware myself? What would be my cost difference?” When he laid out all the costs, it ended up being 10% cheaper than the phone company. “This is it!” he exclaimed.
By the beginning of October 2013, he had secured a data center cabinet in downtown Houston, ordered all the equipment, and had started building the network. After three months of hard work, he completed it and Cloudspace was born.
Helping the Bottom Line
He started with one cabinet. Then a second one in Austin with a highspeed connection between them. It worked well for the 20 or so clients using it for their business network needs. Levin found the power in server clusters and SANs to deliver a virtual desktop with reasonable performance. The desktops, high security, and heavy redundancy combined with a fulltime helpdesk created an enterprise class network for small and medium businesses. The CloudSpace virtual private cloud was up and working.
Then, in the fall of 2017, CloudSpace was hired by a hardware hosting company to build a strategy to move them to AWS and thus eliminate large amounts of hardware. The strategy he developed in this project defined a path to eliminate hardware and related capital costs while creating a CloudSpace-style set of predesigned infrastructure component to build any size network to use anywhere in the world using AWS.
Because the client’s leaders wanted to stay in hardware. Levin realized that CloudSpace could implement the plan he developed and eliminate their hardware and data center cabinet, cutting the need for capital for the next hardware refresh, and migrate CloudSpace to the most power network in the world.
CloudSpace now has more than 60 customers with over 2000 users. With rapid deployment systems, CloudSpace can build out a fully operational Windows network on any continent for use anywhere in the world in only one day. “Every day I am seeing new advantages to having this unlimited capacity” Levin explains. “All these resources are starting to coalesce in ways I never thought they would,” he continues.
With his goal the same as it was many years ago when he first started in the IT business – wanting to make a difference – David Levin says it is still all about delivering great tech and service to help businesses thrive.
