Case Study
Europe’s Leading Photo Service and Online Printing Supplier
HEADQUARTERS
Oldenburg, Germany,
Europe
SECTOR
Imaging, Printing, Photo-Finishing
FLEXIBILITY AND SIMPLICITY HAS DRIVEN ADOPTION
With production facilities and sales offices all over Europe, and a rapidly growing business, a virtualization solution quickly became a necessity. As part of their initial solution architecture assessment and evaluation, CEWE had evaluated OpenStack as a possible solution. Conclusions were quickly drawn regarding the immense complexity and significant cost (both in effort and in capital) to deploy, manage, and maintain an OpenStack solution. Comparatively, with OpenNebula, they found a simple, flexible solution with an intuitive GUI and a set of tools.
POISED FOR THE FUTURE WITH A SCALABLE AND PROVEN PLATFORM
CEWE’s OpenNebula deployment has over 400 VMs, and is continually growing. In support of their commercial business, they have OpenNebula at the base of their online ordering platform for all customers. During peak traffic, they could be handling thousands of orders per hour, and due to the nature of their business, which includes large photo and image processing, the workloads can be significant. Yet, OpenNebula has proven powerful and stable.
Next up within their sights is to be able to carry out effective container management. They are keen to take advantage of OpenNebula’s Docker Hub / Firecracker integration. Udo states, “From a container management perspective, the prospect of being able to connect to Docker Hub via GUI, pick a container and instruct OpenNebula how many of them should be run on the hosts (and in which VLAN etc), then letting OpenNebula take care of the rest – that is hugely promising for us.”
“We have been customers of the OpenNebula enterprise support, and have found it to be well worth the investment. There has always been a quick, clear resolution to every issue we have encountered, even when we changed the underlying storage for all VMs. And as part of an upgrade service, the OpenNebula professionals guided us through a very important upgrade during the main business time and made sure everything remained ‘up and running’.”
Udo Janßen, VP IT Infrastructure
Why OpenNebula?
“For example, one simple benefit with OpenNebula, right out the gate, is how simple it is to drop a VM and to build another one for a separate service, since many key details are retained for easy instantiation”
Udo Janßen, VP IT Infrastructure
About CEWE
As a photo and online printing service company with 14 high-tech production sites and 27 sales offices in Europe, CEWE is a technology and market leader that is rooted in innovation. With a core business in photo-finishing and printing, they sell photo products under several brands including CEWE, WhiteWall, Cheerz, and DeinDesign. And while growing digitization and technological advancements continue to keep the printing industry developing and evolving, CEWE is a leader, not only in continuously improving their products and service experience, but also in improving and investing in their global infrastructure.
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