Open Source to Spur Agile Digital Governments

LOOKING FOR A MORE SCALABLE SOLUTION FOR STORAGE AND COMPUTE

The Flemish Department of Environment and Spatial Planning (dOMG) has been using OpenNebula for the last five years, with almost 800 deployments every week, four clusters (six compute hosts each), four storage clusters (Ceph +/-400 TB each) and 2000 VM’s and counting (of which 500 are Postgres DBs).

They were facing some issues due to the closed source solution they were using:

• • Hardware vendor lock-in.
  • Unable to scale the solution horizontally.
  • High costs due to expensive license and support.
  • Complex configuration with unacceptable DR times

To escape from this situation they decided to look for a more scalable solution for storage and compute with the following characteristics:

• • Automatization (infra as code)
  • Self-service for development teams
  • Mix and mingle of hardware
  • Avoid hardware vendor lock-in
  • On-premises redundant cloud setup
  • Over data center fail-over
  • Shorten DR times

The Agency finally chose OpenNebula for several compelling reasons:

• • It’s an open source software
  • Ease of use
  • Scalability
  • Professional design and installation delivery

In summary, they learned quite easily that OpenNebula would solve their previous issues. Moreover, the enterprise subscription has provided the accessibility and support for making their solution successful.

OpenNebula has fully met their expectations. “We managed to realize a dual data center setup with 2 availability zones per data center”, said Tom Van Gulck, Senior Advisor at the Department of Environment and Spatial Planning.

FUTURE PLANS

“OpenNebula and Rancher is the combination we are going for”, assured Tom Van Gulck. “An integration of those two products would come in handy for us”. Such is its confidence in OpenNebula that the dOMG is using all the commercial services provided by OpenNebula Systems.