Mirantis > Case Studies > Industry Giant Quickly Transforms Storage Service With Powerful, Flexible OpenStack Management Layer

Industry Giant Quickly Transforms Storage Service With Powerful, Flexible OpenStack Management Layer

Customer Company Size

Large Corporate

Region

America

Country

United States

Product

Mirantis OpenStack
Cisco ASR routers
Nexus 1000 switches
Terraform tool

Tech Stack

OpenStack
Cisco Networking
Terraform

Implementation Scale

Enterprise-wide Deployment

Impact Metrics

Productivity Improvements
Cost Savings

Technology Category

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Computing
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Storage Services

Applicable Industries

Electronics
Telecommunications

Applicable Functions

Discrete Manufacturing
Product Research & Development

Services

Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
System Integration
Training

About The Customer

EMC Corporation is a global leader in foundational technologies that allow businesses to store, manage, protect, and analyze data. Founded in 1979, the company has over 70,000 employees in 86 countries. EMC is helping thousands of customers transform operations, deliver IT as a service, and embrace cloud computing. For companies with massively scalable object storage needs that don’t want to build and own infrastructure, EMC is also providing high performance, scalable cloud services. With over one Exabyte of capacity in locations around the world, businesses with expanding IOT, social, and mobile operations can now turn to EMC for mission critical object storage as a service.

The Challenge

EMC Corporation, a leader in foundational technologies for data storage, management, protection, and analysis, was facing challenges with its cloud management layer. The company's massively scalable storage service required a powerful management layer to provision, monitor, and manage cloud resources and transactions. However, the initial management layer's manual processes were demanding excessive staff resources due to recent customer growth. The company needed a new cloud management solution that could handle high availability, performance, and scalability. The solution also needed to be easy-to-use and highly secure. In addition, the new management layer would also be the foundation for two additional cloud services: public compute as a service coupled with the object storage service, and private cloud compute resources for EMC’s internal software development staff.

The Solution

EMC turned to OpenStack for a solution to their cloud management layer challenges. They conducted a small pilot using an OpenStack distribution, reference architecture, and installation tool from the Mirantis website, achieving a working pilot in just two days. They then adapted the Mirantis reference architecture to meet EMC’s unique requirements, including the addition of Cisco ASR routers and Nexus 1000 switches for virtual private network tunneling from end-points to the cloud management layer, and the Terraform tool for building, changing, and versioning infrastructure safely and efficiently. EMC also tapped Mirantis for a design review and OpenStack training. With a newly defined architecture, the Cloud Operations team was ready for production deployment of 18 compute nodes in each of its eight cloud locations. In November 2015, the team deployed the new cloud management layer and met its aggressive launch deadline.

Operational Impact

EMC was able to quickly deploy a new management layer for their highly scalable storage as a service offering, and provide cloud services to the company’s developers.
The team was able to cut two weeks off their stated goal due to the fast and incident-free installation and integration of OpenStack.
The OpenStack deployment led to an unexpected benefit. Developers were invited to use and provide feedback on the OpenStack cloud and the adoption rate was much higher than expected. Consequently, developers are self-provisioning OpenStack resources for build, test and release activities, significantly speeding up their software time-to-market.

Quantitative Benefit