About CloudTurtles
Founder-led.
Engineering-driven.
CloudTurtles is a Cambridge consultancy founded by Huseyin Kartal, an infrastructure engineer of more than fifteen years. It sells no hosting, licences or hardware, so its advice follows your workloads.
A note from the founder
Why CloudTurtles exists
Most of my career has been spent inside managed service providers and in-house IT teams, on the third and fourth line, where the hard problems land.
Between 2020 and 2021 I worked at VMhosts, a Cambridge MSP with three data centres, running its VMware Cloud Director private cloud and its Zerto and Veeam services. It taught me what a provider can and cannot do for a customer. CloudTurtles is not connected to VMhosts; it is the work I learned there, offered independently.
Since then I have led infrastructure projects as a contractor: Azure migrations, VMware lifecycle, backup modernisation and a disaster recovery programme tested every quarter.
The VMware licensing changes and the closure of many cloud provider programmes mean a lot of teams now face decisions they did not plan for. I started CloudTurtles to help them make those decisions with their own data, and then do the work properly.
Huseyin KartalFounder and principal consultant
- 15+
- Years of hands-on infrastructure work
- 300+
- Windows servers supported at a teaching hospital
- vExpert
- VMware vExpert 2019 and 2020
Background
Where it comes from
The founder’s project history, from his CV.
- 2024Mail migration and smart routingLotus Domino and Exchange to Exchange Online for a heritage manufacturer, with a Postfix relay routing each user’s mail during the move. No downtime, no data loss.
- 2021 – presentContract infrastructure consultant, UK payments companyThird and fourth line technical lead: Azure IaaS and PaaS migrations, VMware and VCF lifecycle, Windows and SQL Server upgrades, Backup Exec to Veeam, DR procedure and quarterly tests.
- 2020 – 2021System consultant, VMhosts (Cambridge MSP)VMware Cloud Director private cloud, Zerto DR, Veeam, HPE, Dell and Pure storage, Sophos and WatchGuard firewalls, Microsoft 365 migrations, PowerCLI.
- 2020Infrastructure consultant, Cambridge University Hospitals (via Novosco)Third line for more than 300 Windows servers, VMware and Hyper-V, Veeam, Pure and Dell EMC SAN, Brocade, Exchange 2010 DAG.
- 2019 – 2020Contracts across aviation, charity, manufacturing and retailHybrid Exchange during an airline separation, Windows 10 and RDS upgrades, MDT deployment, Juniper to Cisco Meraki network transition.
- 2018 – 2019System consultant, Vix TechnologyProduction and DR data centres in London supporting branches on four continents: VMware, HP 3PAR and C7000, Cisco ASA and Juniper, Veeam.
- 2007 – 2018MSP and enterprise roles, TurkeySenior system consultant (VMware, NetApp, Zerto, Veeam, Citrix, Trend Micro), HP server and storage specialist, security engineer, desktop engineer.
Principles
How we work
- 01The engineer who scopes it does itNo hand-off from sales to a delivery team you have not met.
- 02Written before it is changedEvery change has a plan, a rollback and a record.
- 03You keep everythingReports, runbooks, diagrams and scripts are yours, in your systems.
- 04Plain about limitsNo 24/7 claims, no certifications we do not hold, no client names without permission.
Let’s build what’s next
Write to Huseyin.
Tell him what you run and what has to change. He replies himself, usually the same day.