Red Hat, Inc. a provider of open source solutions, reports that communications leaders from around the world, including FreeBit, KazTransCom and Turkcell have deployed Red Hat OpenStack Platform, a highly scalable Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) solution, as the foundation for their modern cloud initiatives.
In a world driven by the growth of digital services, new devices, and massive user numbers, communications leaders around the world are modernising their infrastructures to support advanced cloud services and improve the speed at which new services can be created.
Thanks to its ability to massively scale and capabilities to meet the needs of real-time applications without requiring massive increases in physical infrastructure, OpenStack has become a go-to platform for enterprise and communications industry cloud deployments. According to the April 2016 OpenStack User Survey, 14% of OpenStack users were traditional telcos and another 68% were IT companies that include communications as part of their initiatives and services.
Red Hat, a leader in making open technologies safer, more secure, and more easily consumable for business-critical use, provides solutions that serve as the foundation for modern, flexible and scalable cloud deployments.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux, including the high-performance Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor, forms a more stable, more secure, more reliable operating system foundation. Co-engineered with Red Hat Enterprise Linux and hardened and backed by Red Hat’s support life cycle, Red Hat OpenStack Platform offers a proven foundation for communications industry deployments, including network functions virtualisation (NFV).
Red Hat has seen increased adoption of OpenStack, highlighted by several communications leaders selecting Red Hat OpenStack Platform as the backbone of their advanced cloud deployments:
- FreeBit Co., Ltd. headquartered in Tokyo, provides infrastructure services to Internet Service Providers (ISPs). Seeking to modernise an infrastructure built on aging servers, FreeBit looked to the cloud and OpenStack. They selected Red Hat OpenStack Platform to improve services, reliability, and compatibility, and to create a cloud infrastructure capable of supporting its Internet business.
Radhesh Balakrishnan, general manager, OpenStack, Red Hat
By standardising on Red Hat OpenStack Platform and using standard OpenStack APIs, FreeBit was able to automate 75% of its infrastructure builds, work that had previously been manually conducted. To move its work to production with minimal downtime, FreeBit uses the blue-green deployment approach, running identical and interchangeable Red Hat OpenStack Platform environments for test and production.
Five of FreeBit’s services and its Internet of Things (IoT) service development infrastructure now run on Red Hat OpenStack Platform. FreeBit’s highly maneuverable Red Hat OpenStack Platform-based infrastructure has helped the company create new business value, supporting faster innovation by trial and error.
- KazTransCom is one of the largest telecommunications operators in Kazakhstan and boasts a modern network infrastructure that stretches for tens of thousands of kilometers. To innovate and increase revenue potential, it wanted to add new cloud services for business customers, including a public cloud and a highly reliable and scalable NFV platform for network equipment.
Following a thorough competitive review, KazTransCom chose a solution based on Red Hat OpenStack Platform and Red Hat Ceph Storage, with Cisco UCS hardware, as the basis of its new cloud platform. With its Red Hat-based cloud platform, KazTransCom has found a reliable, easily managed solution that offers the flexibility and scalability it needs to easily provision new services, with sufficient spare performance to handle new client wins and additional customer requirements.
- Turkcell is a converged telecommunication and technology services provider, founded and headquartered in Turkey. It serves its customers with voice, data, TV and value-added consumer and enterprise services on mobile and fixed networks. Turkcell launched LTE services in its home country on April 1, 2016, employing LTE-Advanced and three carrier aggregation technologies in 81 cities.
In 2G and 3G, Turkcell’s population coverage is at 99.80% and 95.14%, respectively, as of June 2016. It offers up to 1 Gbps fiber internet speed with its FTTH services. Turkcell Group companies serve 66.5 million subscribers in nine countries – Turkey, Ukraine, Belarus, Northern Cyprus, Germany, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Georgia, Moldova – as of June 30, 2016.
Turkcell Group reported a TRY3.4 billion revenue with total assets of TRY28.6 billion as of June 30, 2016. It has been listed on the NYSE and the BIST since July 2000, and is the only NYSE-listed company in Turkey.
For more than a decade, Turkcell has trusted Red Hat Enterprise Linux as a strategic operating platform for its infrastructure. In collaboration with Red Hat Consulting, Turkcell built Turkcell Akıllı Depo (“Lifebox”), a self-service cloud based storage application that runs on Red Hat OpenStack Platform, built using OpenStack’s Object Storage (Swift) capabilities.
Moving the app in-house has resulted in savings for Turkcell, and they are now able to bring new capabilities to market faster. Because of the success of the project, Turkcell is also developing its BIP messaging application and other services on Red Hat OpenStack Platform.
Radhesh Balakrishnan, general manager, OpenStack, Red Hat, said: “FreeBit, KazTransCom and Turkcell are stellar examples of the modernisation and transformation we are seeing in the communications industry. They have turned to open source – and to Red Hat – to help them create more agile, flexible, and scalable clouds that can meet their needs now and well into the future.
The promise of OpenStack in the communications industry is now becoming a reality, and Red Hat is proud to work with organisations around the globe to help them with such transformation and modernisation initiatives.”
“When selecting an OpenStack distribution, we placed the most importance on quality,” added Koichi Inokuchi, subdirector, YourNet Service Division, FreeBit Co., Ltd. “With regard to quality, while operation of OpenStack itself and compatibility with hardware was also important, we most considered quality of support from distributors.
In troubleshooting during the assessment period and considering configuration, we collaborated deeply with Red Hat’s engineers, and they responded quickly to OpenStack issues with our systems. Through such opportunities, we appreciated Red Hat’s support, proposals, and high technological ability. Red Hat has also been working on translation of its product manuals into Japanese in a timely manner.
Their content played a very important role in our understanding of OpenStack and specifications of the product. With this new infrastructure introduced, FreeBit could advance one more step in making system operation management automatic and more efficient. OpenStack is a technology which is expected to develop further. We expect Red Hat to drive its evolution as an industry leader for OpenStack.”
Maxim Popov, head of R&D, KazTransCom: concluded: “Red Hat’s leadership in providing robust, enterprise-ready, open source technology that offered vendor flexibility—as well as the easy integration of Red Hat software with KazTransCom’s Cisco server hardware—appealed to our technology strategy. With Red Hat OpenStack Platform and Red Hat Ceph Storage, KazTransCom can easily scale to provision new services for its business customers—with spare processing power to handle the demands of new and current clients.”
Comment on this article below or via Twitter: @ VanillaPlus OR @jcvplus
