Case: Clouds as a Tool for Optimizing IT Infrastructure

Often, business representatives who, for one reason or another, do not have their own expertise in IT (a common situation is the lack of specialists in small companies) are forced to overpay for expensive “software” and “iron” solutions due to an elementary lack of knowledge. At the same time, experienced integrators and IT companies can help solve many problems with far less power. Today we would like to talk about our work experience in a similar situation.

Situation

One day a project request came from a large international company that decided to open an additional office in Moscow.
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After talking with the client company's specialists, it became clear that for the needs of the office, there would be enough two middle-level servers - one file and one terminal - in the future, another one could be added to them (the database server). This is a fairly typical set of tasks, without any fantasies - all software and all iron infrastructure are designed for 20 workplaces, both stationary and with the possibility of remote access. At each workplace, of course, must be present office software and the ability to communicate by mail.

The company only opened an office in Moscow, so in the future, with luck, she planned to expand it, hiring more employees. However, neither the approximate number of new people, nor the timing in which they may appear, was not known. We had to take this into account when creating the infrastructure.

Problems

The premises for the future office were located in a beautiful historical building in the very center of the city. However, beauty is beauty, but from an IT point of view, the building had nothing to boast about - in particular, there were no dedicated server rooms (and free space for organizing them from scratch), but there were difficulties with cooling and ventilating technical rooms.

Decision

When building a technical infrastructure, a good solution is to move the various components of the systems to the cloud. In addition to simple convenience, this allows reducing costs - the need to purchase real “iron” servers disappears (although in this particular project the costs for the client company were not important).

This solution ensures the reliability of the infrastructure, which for most clients is the most important point - there is no risk of server failure and the impact of various unforeseen circumstances (for example, a flood in the office).

With virtual machines, life becomes somewhat simpler. This, for example, can be said about the service of organizing a virtual PBX - a virtual telephone exchange is easy to maintain, which is very convenient for companies that outsource IT services and do not have their technical specialists.

However, not everything is so smooth, and there are certain disadvantages in the implementation of such a scheme of work. Chief among them is that when moving to the cloud, business representatives are often suspicious of data integrity and confidentiality. In the case of large companies with branch offices, the head office often delivers well-defined security policies that must be met by locally procured IT services - up to the patterned sets of hardware used.

Implementation

As a result, it was decided to use the advantages of both cloud and “iron” solutions, combining them.

The client was put in the office with a server that was sufficient for his configuration tasks (Windows Server, Quad Core XEON, 16Gb Ram, 2x2Tb HDD).

Not the main part of the infrastructure was hosted on virtual machines in Celecom distributed data centers, backups were also added to the cloud. For the virtual machine, two processor cores and 6 GB of RAM were allocated.



Thanks to the web-based management system, the management of the client company can adjust the level of consumption, reduce or add machine resources through a personal account, based on statistics provided in the same interface. The virtual server disk had a capacity of 100 GB.

Office software (MS Office and mail on Exchange) was also transferred to the cloud. The client company rented software as a service. This approach made it possible to simplify the task of administering licenses depending on the “turnover” of personnel and the recruitment process for new employees.

Maintenance of both software and hardware of the built infrastructure was completely transferred to our company, which allowed the client to focus on solving the problems of his business, without being distracted by the administration of the telephone network.

Result

As a result of a fairly short-term project, the client company received a modern solution (IT infrastructure, software, remote access and a virtual telephony network) with backup and the ability to quickly scale if necessary in the future. At the same time, the need for self-tuning and support of the system disappeared (the client did not have plans to hire IT staff in the Moscow branch), in addition, by using cloud technologies, the total cost of the project was reduced.

Posts on the topic:

• How to save business on telephony: Virtual PBX
• Cloud Resources: White and Fluffy Cloud - Part 1
• White and fluffy cloud - part 2