A comprehensive system for IaaS and PaaS services
Technopark Pomerania provides data center services for public sector customers and companies in the West Pomeranian region. The solution has been sought for efficient building and management of services based on the newly-built Data Center. The project was financed within the framework of cooperative relationship of IT companies in the region. The park was interested in a solution which allowed changes in the platform source codes by cooperating companies in order to build innovative data center services and products in the future.
In addition, Technopark Pomerania was concerned that key elements of the system were made available as a part of a free license in order to minimize the operational risk of the Data Center, so that the Data Center was profitable at the end of the project in case only pessimistic forecasts of the size of future sales were fulfilled. An additional objective of the project was to make the best use of hardware facilities owned by Technopark Pomerania and possibly shorten the time to launch new servers to a few hours.
During the competitive dialogue, the OpenStack platform, which has become more and more popular and developed by a wide group of companies (including IBM, DELL, NASA, CERN, and Rackspace) and users, has been chosen from among the available virtualization platforms based on Open Source solutions. OpenStack platform is gaining importance due to its flexibility, and its users highlight the following advantages:
“The use of OpenStack environment enables to create a real data center based on software solutions” – says Adam Kuźmiński, CIO at Softline
“Today, when the delivery of new servers arrives at our data center, we can launch one operating cluster using them within 1 day” - says Katarzyna Wiśniewska, project manager at Technopark Pomerania
It was necessary to provide additional applications supplementing the OpenStack platform – Billing, Self-service, Customer Portal, Knowledge Base, PaaS (OpenShift), NOC in order to fulfill the business requirements posed on the solution.
Upon the completion of the analysis phase, six months remained for the implementation of the entire system, and the estimated time to produce the required components from scratch would last two years. By using components from Softline’s own products, we could successfully deploy the entire solution in the prescribed deadlines.
C4C platform was launched for customers in January 2016. It received very good reviews from business and public administration. Technopark Pomerania and Softline teams worked together from the very beginning of the project, which contributed to the final project’s success. When implementing the C4C platform, Softline developers benefited from OpenStack development environment, which resulted in a reduction of some of some work and the acquisition of in-depth knowledge on virtualization. The acquired experience allows Softline to provide services in OpenStack and its use by different customers to meet their particular business goals. Successful completion of the C4C project also resulted in new ideas concerning the introduction of new and development of existing services based entirely on the C4C platform.
“In the near future, we want to most efficiently use human and hardware resources for the development of services based on OpenStack” – says Katarzyna Wiśniewska, manager of ICT consulting department at Technopark Pomerania