The war brought changes to all areas of activity without exception, and for any business manager, the need to ensure business continuity has been added to the problem of establishing remote work. As a result, the following questions have become relevant::
- How do I transfer data and services to a secure location?
- How can I ensure user access to data and restore the smooth operation of teams?
- What should I do if the communication channels are damaged?
We turned to Pavel Yarmak, an expert in building server infrastructures at Seeton, and asked him to share his improvements on this issue using the example of a real implemented project:
"Every day of the war comes the understanding that it is necessary to adapt to the changes that have taken place and try to do everything to contribute to our victory. At first, the actions were chaotic, but getting more and more similar requests, as the search for solutions to problems began, the necessary solution architecture began to emerge. Given that the vast majority of companies use VMware products in their infrastructure, the need to integrate the ground infrastructure of VMware with the VMware infrastructure of a cloud provider located outside of Ukraine was taken as a basis.
Several cloud solutions were tested, of which IBM's services were the most attractive. During the analysis, the following features of IBM Cloud in comparison with other suppliers determined the strategic choice of partnership::
- Possibility of individual configuration and provision of computing power;
- Availability of configurations that are officially certified for SAP use;
- Full administrator rights to use the Vmware infrastructure;
- Ability to select versions of VMware infrastructure components, such as vSphere ESXi, NSX-T, vSAN, vRealize, and others;
- Provision of equipment for rent based on IBM Power processors, which significantly reduces the cost of licensing Oracle databases;
- No billing of incoming traffic and traffic between IBM Cloud data centers;
- Ability to negotiate the use of already purchased VMware licenses.
Subsequently, within one week, our team prepared the IBM cloud infrastructure for further integration with the existing ground infrastructure in Ukraine using the Site-to-Site VPN functionality between VMware NSX-T in the cloud and Cisco ASA in the ground data center.
A few days later, we had to solve a problem with communication channels that could not be found quickly. There was an idea to use SDWAN technology in a slightly different form. Considering that the customer at that time already had more than a dozen Starlink sets, the simultaneous operation of several Starlink dishes, an LTE modem from Vodafone, a terrestrial Internet connection channel with speeds up to 100 Mb / s and an SDWAN solution that acts as an aggregator of all available channels into one secure channel with high bandwidth was proposed and tested. At the same time, a virtual SDWAN Edge was deployed in the IBM cloud and a Point-to-Point connection was built between the IBM Cloud and the ground data center.
Using the backup system software, a policy was set up to create backups first in the ground data center storage, and after that, automatic replication to Object Storage in IBM Cloud with the possibility of further data recovery already in the dedicated virtual cloud infrastructure.
At the moment, to optimize user access to the resulting hybrid infrastructure, an increase in the number of SDWAN gateways and their distribution between divisions in Ukraine is being considered."
The Seeton team is always in touch to ensure the continuity of your business: Sales@seeton.pro