Keeping Things Moving with OpenNebula

HOW FLEXIBILITY BREEDS THE NEEDED STANDARDIZATION

The Dustin Group, an organization whose rapid growth through the past few decades can largely be attributed to several business acquisitions, has a focus and an underlying need for standardization. Managing an environment with a large spread of acquired technologies is costly to operate, both from an economic and a complexity perspective. Yet, not only for its internal organization, but also to adapt to customer needs with great customer experience, their services and solutions are based on standardized, configurable modules.

“With the Open API structure we can adjust and adopt tools and services on top of the platform that gives us operational benefits, both from a technical and economical point of view.”

Dan Martensson, Service Product Manager

The overall flexibility of OpenNebula has been a key factor in minimizing the complexity that Dustin has looked to shed. An increasing growth in data and a broadening customer base translate into more demanding and varied customer requirements. With customers across several markets—Large Corporate and Public (LCP), Small and Medium-size Businesses (SMB), and B2C—Dustin has a broad range of needs and requirements to address. Yet, being able to take advantage of the overall flexibility provided by OpenNebula since they started using it in 2015, has alleviated much of the expected complexity, and has facilitated a streamlined standardization of their offerings.

WHERE ECONOMICS COME INTO PLAY, OPENNEBULA PROVIDES A “WINNING HAND”

As their business continues to mature, including the periodic business acquisitions that they have been able to execute, Dustin has seen their platform evolve and grow. And with a need to work with several vendors and technologies, and to ensure seamless integration, OpenNebula has provided extended flexibility and has eased the overall integration requirements.

With four separate OpenNebula instances geographically distributed and managed across multiple countries, Dustin has been able to watch their infrastructure grow and very easily scale their OpenNebula implementation. However, not only has OpenNebula’s ability to scale technologically been a key factor in their ability to grow and innovate, but the fact that OpenNebula is an established open source technology has provided them with a confidence to continue growing, and to simultaneously reap the benefits of significant financial savings.

“Not only have we rated OpenNebula for its flexibility and scalability, but it has also provided us a much more economical option compared other products on the market.”

Dan Martensson, Service Product Manager

Dustin is not only a long-time user of OpenNebula, but they are also Premium subscribers to the OpenNebula subscription, where they have been able to work closely with the OpenNebula Support and Engineering teams. Additionally, when the need for assistance arose to upgrade their enterprise software, they took advantage of the OpenNebula Upgrade professional service. Yet, when comparing to other products on the market, the overall “price tag” for running an enterprise-supported OpenNebula solution is notably more economical, and has been a key factor for Dustin.

“OPEN SOURCE” OPENS THE DOOR TO OPPORTUNITY

OpenNebula is open source at its core in every sense of the word. And while Dustin is an enterprise customer with an active subscription, the foundation provided by the OpenNebula user community is an extra dynamic that fosters innovation and has allowed Dustin to benefit from open knowledge and use case sharing. Some of the next things they look to tackle are utilizing container orchestration with Firecracker and Kubernetes, as well as assessing their need for true hybrid cloud capabilities.