Nexica needed a solution capable of accelerating the provisioning of new cloud services in order to offer the most customised service while retaining its simplified management and improved availability. Thanks to VMware's solutions, the company has been able to accelerate the provisioning of services, improve their management and integrate new models for supplying and invoicing these services by incorporating measurement of consumption into the invoicing system.

The aim of the project was to define, roll out and start up a solution capable of accelerating the provisioning of new cloud services with a view to offering maximum customization while retaining their simplified management and improved availability. Another goal was to improve the management of changes (rollback, concept tests, test environments, etc.) and reduce the TCO of the services through a more efficient use of the hardware, as well as reducing the datacenter space per customer.

Private Cloud Computing

Nexica chose VMware because it is the market leader and the manufacturer which inspires most confidence in view of the fact that this was technologically a more mature solution which had been more extensively tested in professional environments. The strategic decision was analysed and presented by the Operations and Engineering departments, and approved by the steering committee, which includes a representation from the various corporate departments (Operations, Commercial, Business Development, Finance and HR).

Another key factor considered when selecting VMware was their strategic alliances, materialised in tangible solutions such as vBlock, and their VSSP licensing model, which enables the pay-per-use model to be extended to the end customer. Furthermore, the VMware solutions can be integrated with other solutions geared to Cloud Computing, such as vCloud Director, vCenter Chargeback and vShield, so they reduce the “Time to Market” in this type of services.

The project consisted of implementing a new hardware technology on a vBlock configuration and the whole VMware technological suite for IaaS management, which would enable the launch of the suite of cloud computing services (Nexica Private & Hybrid Cloud). Nexica has modified its catalogue of services to reflect the new functionalities of the platform (self-service and pay-per-use) and to launch its Nexica Private Cloud. Based on the APIs of vCloud Director provided by VMware, Nexica has developed its own cloud query panel to enable it to reduce and simplify the server management processes, optimise their management and accelerate the provisioning of servers and add-ons, and particularly to improve the capacity and definition of service levels and availability. Furthermore, the VMware solution offers the necessary tools to build complex hybrid solutions and value-added services on the Cloud, such as the Disaster Recovery as a Service (RaaS).

Results

• Capacity to provisioning services in hours rather than weeks.
• Possibility of offering pay-per-use and on-demand cloud services.
• Optimisation of physical resources (hardware and technical space).
• Extension of the catalogue of services with new IaaS-based solutions.
• Integration with other customers' and/or providers' cloud services.

David Suárez, Director of Technology and Operations, at Nexica: “VMware's vCloud Director has allowed us to bring the control of the infrastructure closer to the customer and to gain flexibility in integrating and implementing hybrid solutions”.