telent, a leading technology company which specialises in the effective operation of critical national infrastructure, has empowered Digital Transformation and hybrid cloud for a variety of use cases from rail and traffic, public safety and defence to enterprise after deploying the Scality RING solution.
telent is a leading technology company which designs and delivers solutions and services for organisations to create, improve and maintain their mission-critical communications networks, vital in the effective operation of the nation’s infrastructure.
At the heart of many of the UK and Ireland’s best-known brands, telent operates within a variety of industry sectors including transport, service provider, public safety, defence and government/public services.
telent’s industry expertise and professionalism make the company a partner of choice for organisations at the forefront of the digital revolution including Highways England, HM Coastguard, London Ambulance Service, Merseyside Fire and Rescue, Metropolitan Police, Network Rail, RNLI, Sky, Transport for London, Virgin Media and Vodafone.
When the company, which is made up of around 2,300 employees, decided to develop a cloud services platform, it looked for a scalable, secure and simple storage solution.
telent turned to Scality’s Ring solution – a software defined native file and object store solution for large scale on-premises storage of unstructured data.
We spoke to Matthew Latter, Solutions Architect at telent, to find out more about the benefits of the system.
What were the key challenges you were looking to address ahead of selecting Scality?
When telent decided to develop a cloud service platform, we did so against a set of design principles – the six S’s of security, scalability, speed, stability, simplicity and serviceability. The platform provides services that support national critical infrastructure so it was important that every component part of the platform excelled in its ability to meet the design principles.
Why did you choose to work with the provider and to select the solution/s?
telent has a number of strategic vendor partnerships in data centre technologies, HPE, Juniper and Cisco being the three main ones.
It was through our HPE relationship that we have built our relationship with Scality.
When telent decided to build a secure and managed cloud services platform we went to our strategic partners with a set of design principles and produced a design based on HPE server and storage as the basis of the platform, Scality for object storage and Juniper for the layers of network and security.
More specifically, the requirement was for cost effective scale out object storage in a secure, stable and resilient fashion and Scality ticked every box we required.
Furthermore, with HPE being a strategic infrastructure partner to telent, leveraging the strong ties between HPE and Scality, and layering the Scality Software Defined Storage ‘stack’ on top of HPE Apollo server hardware produced a very compelling solution.
How long did it take to implement the solution?
The implementation of the Scality solution was part of the wider and overall build out of the telent cloud platform.
How does the new system integrate with your existing systems?
Scality object storage is used in the telent Cloud Platform in a number of ways:
- As a scale out, cost effective object tier of storage to support any customer consuming IaaS resources from the telent Cloud Platform.
- As a scale out, cost effective tier of storage supporting telent’s digital asset management solution that was primarily developed around digital evidence management for UK police forces. This stores digital evidence uploaded by police officers that is managed by an application providing intelligent search, scan, analysis, management and secure sharing of assets.
- As an S3 compliant scale out storage tier to support telent’s Backup-as-a-Service (BaaS) service offering, enabling us to automatically ‘age’ data out to a longer-term retention tier of storage.
How do your customers benefit from the system?
telent’s customers benefit by having access to an object storage tier that is secure, resilient, massively scalable and cost effective. With the Scality Ring providing resilience across multiple data centres and supporting a multi-tenant environment of cloud services, it provides telent with the ability to design and create new services knowing that the Scality Ring is in place and already providing the benefits mentioned above.
What are the main benefits of the system?
Being software defined and therefore decoupled from the hardware, it gives us the flexibility to deploy it on server infrastructure that is right sized for the solution.
Other areas are the resilience it provides. Our solutions are used to support national critical services and so to retain data in long term retention – lifetime retention in some cases – it is essential that we can rely on the storage platform to deliver.
Scalability is also key. As a service provider, we need to be able scale the solution in situ, while running, with no impact to services. Couple this with the data retention requirements and petabyte scale becomes very important.
How far has the system future-proofed your company?
It has given us a platform on which multiple services can rely on in a multi-tenant, service provider world.
What does the launch of RING8 – enhancements to the product enable unique data visibility and control across distributed sites and clouds – mean for telent and its customers?
RING8 provides a number of benefits. Enhanced security and multi-tenant features fit very well in supporting telent’s customers and services so are always welcome.
The addition of eXtended Data Management (XDM) is of particular interest as it provides data management capabilities across clouds and multiple RINGs.
Many of telent’s customers have solutions that are edge centric when it comes to data creation, so being able to provide data management and governance from edge to core with a single namespace is an interesting prospect.
What trends are you seeing/expecting to see within the infrastructure space?
Hybrid and Edge to core are really hot topics at the moment. Pretty much every customer conversation starts by understanding their approach to all things ‘cloud’.
A hybrid model brings with it many benefits and coupled with a data conversation (unstructured) around where it is created, how it is managed, protected and secured should lead directly into a RING8 and XDM conversation.
More specifically around infrastructure, with more and more solutions becoming software defined and therefore decoupled from infrastructure, the underlying infrastructure becomes more of a commodity item.
However, the infrastructure layer still needs to provide resilience, ease of management (via industry standard REST API) and be secure as not to undermine the capabilities you layer on top using software defined applications and solutions.
