Ukrainian company has developed a private cloud for Silicon Valley startups

    Company Lohika specializes in software development and engineering solutions for various companies. Included in the Altran group of companies. For many years SIM-Networks has been a constant hosting partner of the company, providing development capabilities, - Lohika’s IT department created with our help a private cloud for its and client projects. Edward Smyshlyaev, IT Director of Lohika, told us how he works with SIM-Networks in a short interview.

    Edward, your company has chosen SIM-Networks in the search for solutions to specific problems. What was it, what tasks did you face and how did you solve them?

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

    At the first stage, when we were only collecting information, there were about 30 companies in the list of potential hosting partners. What immediately caught my eye - for a very long time I had to wait for answers to requests. On average, about 4-5 business days. I can only remember one company that answered faster - their answers came in 3 days. This 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 turned to you.



    How did the interaction go?

    From the very beginning, we were pleasantly surprised by the speed of the response, especially against the background of 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 for an answer and technical expertise, the manager kept us in the know. Those. the hoster was not a “black box” for us, we always knew what was happening with our potential partner.
    It is worth noting that a very important technical parameter for the data center is ping time. At SIM-Networks, it was about 30-50 ms. For other European hosters we examined, we came across indicators at the level of 200-300 ms. And also important: your prices were much lower.

    I’ll note right away that we did not consider the option of a public cloud, or a low-cost airline — 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. Security and access issues are critical. This is the first. The second is the failover and disaster tolerance of the hoster's infrastructure. Data in our cloud should have been available 24/7. In addition, flexible scalability is important for us: today customers use one amount of data, tomorrow the amount of data has grown and we need more space, more capacity, and we must be able to respond flexibly to this.

    How did you build your private cloud in SIM-Networks?

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

    Now in our cloud in 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. For channel encryption, the Cisco ASA Gateway is used.



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

    About 5 years ago, we had a question about deploying a test environment for developers. Currently deployed 2 clouds. They are used as laboratories in which programmers / testers deploy and test their projects. The 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, therefore 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 to automate processes.

    How is your private cloud in SIM-Networks used now?

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

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

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



    Are you planning to expand your cloud?

    Of course, our strategic plans are to expand the package of services and provide our facilities for rent. This will help to develop and improve our own cloud infrastructure, which 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 the cloud is deployed, 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 fulfilled all our requests and wishes.





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