A large government datacenter in Europe with 1300 employees prides itself with using the most modern technologies to further improve the IT services they provide to their administration. The Government Cloud is now a certified, fully-automated fail-safe solution, thanks to state-of-the-art cloud technology that comdivision has implemented.
“We offer PaaS and SaaS, as well as professional administration services to our clients, the various government agencies. We also provide orchestration and management support when we transfer our clients’ data into the (private) cloud” said the head of infrastructure, “the government agencies benefit from the advantages of efficiency and flexibility the cloud brings, but we needed to change the way we provision the resources” he continued.
"We see this all the time, where manual processes and provisioning lead to frustration and policy breaches” knew Yves Sandfort, comdivision’s lead architect on this project. “The infrastructure team was spending a lot of time building what the internal clients needed” he continued, “add approval processes and security measures to it, and you can imagine why it took up to 100 days to provision a new system to the dev ops teams”.
"We suggested to use vRealize Automation to build an automated private cloud for the internal clients” said Sandfort. comdivision showed the customer, how firewalls could be deployed for each virtual machine, using VMware NSX’s micro-segmentation, to allow a finer configuration of security measures. “In our design, we customized NSX-v to automate the configuration of security groups and policies for these firewalls” explained Sandfort.
Furthermore, the comdivision design included the use of Red Hats systems management suite “Satellite” and the software configuration tool “Puppet” to enable fully automated Linux deployments from scratch.
With the self-service portal, comdivision enabled the internal customers to request needed services on-demand and these services would be provisioned in a fully automated fashion.
“comdivision took on a process that was measured in weeks, or sometimes month”, said the head of infrastructure, “and now – with the help of vRealize Automation and NSX – we are measuring the same processes in minutes”, he praised.
“Integrating Satellite and Puppet provided the customer with a clean install, including custom configurations for the users” said Sandfort, “my team also implemented a ticket system with a Configuration Management Database (CMDB) to automatically document the business processes.”
