Infrastructure as a Service

Businesses today, regardless of the industry in which they operate, need a variety of IT services. These are provided within environments consisting mainly of servers, arrays and workstations, based on which it is possible to run the relevant applications. Such infrastructure for smooth operation must be provided with specialized care by employees of the company’s dedicated IT department, or it can be outsourced.

Enhanced IT environments are characterized by the fact that effective operation relies on the proper selection of many components. It is a kind of organism that, along with the need for change in a certain area, requires investment in several other areas. For example, if we need more space for our data and there is a greater demand for workstations, the company must consider acquiring larger and more efficient disk arrays and new servers. On the other hand, we need to invest in a more efficient and faster LAN/SAN for data transfer, and this entails the purchase of more advanced network equipment, for example. Finally, it turns out that as the amount of data on the arrays themselves increases, you need to provide adequate space for backups in the backup system. The specialist in charge of taking care of the infrastructure must remember to purchase the appropriate licenses to unlock various functionalities, as well as to ensure an adequate level of manufacturer support in case technical problems arise.

The very process of gathering the relevant knowledge is time-consuming. You need to analyze whether you can expand your current equipment by purchasing licenses, for example, to unlock additional ports in the switch, or whether it might be better to buy more equipment at the same price. Expiring periods of vendor support (support) similarly require careful analysis, whether it is worth buying a new device for the price of extending support for the existing one, even though the old equipment is sufficient for us. Those managing the environment need to have a broad knowledge, from the hardware, the various manufacturer support terms for different types of devices and systems, to the applications themselves. Maintaining the system and resolving problems quickly requires more resources.

A separate problem is that we are operating on physical equipment, which requires premises that meet certain standards to operate efficiently. It is worth remembering that the backup system, for security reasons, should be located in a physically separate place from the source data, which further complicates the task of proper equipment placement. The solution to the problematic issue of equipment storage may be the colocation service available from SNP Poland (currently All for One Poland). It allows access to specially prepared premises of All for One Data Centers, meeting the exacting criteria for professional server rooms.

Co-location alone, however, does not mean that a business can forget about having to deal with its equipment. A solution that goes one step further is access to infrastructure as a service. For a long time, such steps have been made by Qarson (EDP Group), which has been using the collocation of its systems at SNP Poland for many years. At the same time, cooperation in the cloud infrastructure service is being gradually developed. At Qarson, a strategic decision has been made to replace individual servers and devices with a scalable IaaS service instead of buying new ones as they reach the end of their life cycle. This gives the company access to appropriately dedicated and configured All for One Data Centers resources, depending on the demand occurring at any given time.

The Infrastructure as a Service model assumes that Qarson does not have to worry about the hardware layer and the potential problems that occur with it. It only provides virtual machines that run in an environment prepared by SNP, so that the scope of administrative activities required on the part of the client’s IT department is limited to the operating system and the tools and applications running on it. In addition, SNP Poland (now All for One Poland) consultants have prepared virtual machine templates, based on which Qarson can request a new system. This convenience contributes to significantly shortening the process of preparing a new system in the environment. In addition, the company determines whether a particular system is to be backed up. The correctness of the backups is supervised by the service provider.

Lukasz Filut, IT Managing Director, Qarson

The main advantages of the IaaS solution are scalability according to current demand and changing business conditions. When Qarson has a need to test new solutions, it doesn’t have to worry about physical resources.

IaaS means optimizing hardware expenses and relieving the burden on IT staff, who can focus on more responsible and strategic tasks instead of administering hardware. Another benefit is the increase of SLA (Service Level Agreement), i.e. the level of service availability thanks to the use of state-of-the-art solutions and minimization of the risk of business interruption by SNP Poland. The above aspects translate into savings and enable more stable business.