Ukrainian company has developed a private cloud for Silicon Valley startups

Lohika specializes in developing software and engineering solutions for various companies. Included in the Altran group of companies. SIM Networks has been a regular hosting partner of the company for several years now, providing capacity for development, - the IT department of Lohika has created a private cloud for our own and client projects with our help. Edward Smyshlyaev, IT Director of Lohika, told us about how to work with SIM-Networks in a short interview.

Edward, your company has chosen SIM-Networks in the process of finding solutions to specific problems. What was it, what challenges did you have and how did you solve them?

The global challenge was to choose a powerful hosting provider that would suit us in a number of ways. The first parameter is geographical. European hosting was needed so that the data center is located between the USA, Ukraine and Romania. The second point is technical: data exchange rate, waiting periods. The third is legislative: for US customers it was very important that the hosting provider fell under the jurisdiction of the European Union, especially in terms of data access and data storage (customer data could not be located in Ukraine). Another important limitation was equipment that could not be owned by us. In this case, it would impose restrictions on US accounting law: we would have to pay double rent.

At the first stage, when we only collected information, there were about 30 companies in the list of potential hosting partners. What immediately caught my eye - for a long time I had to wait for answers to requests. On average, about 4-5 business days. I can remember only one company that answered faster - their answers came in 3 days. It did not suit us. We believe that already at this managerial level, the company is demonstrating its SLA. At some point, I remembered a meeting with a representative of SIM-Networks and addressed you.
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How did the interaction happen?

From the very beginning, we were pleasantly surprised by the speed of response, especially compared to other hosters, - the answer to our first request came in 5 minutes. There was a quick and, most importantly, transparent miscalculation of prices. Even in questions that required more time to answer and technical expertise, the manager kept us informed about what was happening. Those. the hoster was not a “black box” for us, we always knew what was going on with our potential partner.
It is worth noting that a very important technical parameter of the data center is ping time. At SIM Networks, it was about 30-50 ms. For the other European hosters we reviewed, we were faced with indicators at the level of 200-300 ms. And it is also important: your prices were much lower.

Immediately, I note that the public cloud option, or low-cost airline, was not considered by us - we store customer data. For this reason, we could not consider Amazon.



Why not low-cost? They say it's cheaper?

All the same - customer data. Issues of security and access to them are critical. This is the first. The second is the failure and disaster recovery infrastructure of the host. Data in our cloud should have been available 24/7. In addition, flexible scalability is important for us: today, customers use the same amount of data, tomorrow the volume of data has grown and we need more space, more capacity - and we should be able to respond to it flexibly.

How did you build your private cloud in SIM Networks?

Let's start with the requirements for our infrastructure. This is an enterprise level. We used HPE equipment for which we rent VMware licenses. Backing up virtual machine data is provided by Veeam virtual solutions that integrate seamlessly with VMware solutions. To ensure disaster recovery, we were looking for a provider whose infrastructure network nodes would be duplicated according to the N + 1 scheme. SIM Networks had everything needed for the structure that we conceived.

Now in our cloud in the SIM-Networks deployed VMware Enterprise Cluster HA, DRS with high availability plus EVC. Also, vSAN Distributed Storage and the necessary traffic balancer are deployed in our infrastructure. The channel is encrypted using the Cisco ASA Gateway.



Do you use popular now Open Source solutions in your IT infrastructure?

About 5 years ago we had a question about the deployment of a test environment for developers. Currently 2 clouds are deployed. They are used as laboratories in which programmers / testers deploy and test their projects. Clouds are hosted locally and built on Open Source solutions. For this infrastructure, we used equipment that could no longer be used for production. In this case, the criticality of data in this environment is not so important, so we use these solutions (Open Source) only for our internal development needs. We have provided access to the API to our developers, and all the time we help our programmers automate processes.

How is your private cloud now used in SIM Networks?

We use 60% of our capacity for our needs, - for production, 40% are used by our clients.

Can you tell more about your customers who use the cloud, if you can, of course?

Among our customers who use our cloud, there are 5-6 Silicon Valley startups. We do not resell capacities; we provide clients with capacities within projects. Also, within the framework of cooperation, we support client cloud IT infrastructure.



Are you planning to expand your cloud?

Of course, in our strategic plans - to expand the package of services provided and to provide our facilities for rent. This will help develop and improve our own cloud infrastructure that is provided to customers.

What can you say about technical support and cooperation with SIM Networks? It is not necessary to praise :) If there are any complaints, we will fix it :)

From the moment of the cloud deployment, to the moments of some numerous technical clarifications, which are numerous in such large-scale cloud projects, all this is beyond praise!
For 1.5 years of cooperation there were no problems - your administrators have always clearly worked out all our requests and wishes.

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