NETKONCEPT SOLVES HARDWARE PROBLEMS
TO RAMP UP APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT

NETKONCEPT.COM CASE STUDY

Freeing administrators from managing the hardware layer, immediate availability of resources, and increased security - these are key objectives for Netkoncept, a company implementing projects mainly for public administration. Netkoncept decided to migrate to the cloud as stability and data protection are particularly important.

The team at Netkoncept has been on the market since 2001 and currently has eleven employees specialized in building and implementing unique eCommerce and eGovernment database systems and website content management solutions (CMS). The company also developed and implemented a travel planning tool - sway.to.

Netkoncept has cooperated with over 600 public institutions and companies, including the well-known business publishing house Helion.

We are a creative team of professionals with IT and economic education and many years of experience in the Internet industry. That allows us to ensure the highest quality of products and services

Katarzyna Kowalska, Marketing Manager at Netkoncept.com

CHALLENGES

Maintaining a wide portfolio of network services required systematic development of the infrastructure. A dedicated server needed constant expansion due to the increasing number of customers. Most often, it was necessary to expand the platform with more RAM and increase the space for data, i.e. adding new hard drives.

Each necessary work required planning and informing customers about the inevitable technical breaks. What's worse, the hardware purchases were "exaggerated" and the team was always afraid of failures despite the redundancy of the most important components.

In turn, with the company development and the growing number of customers, the bandwidth allocated to the server (15 Mbps) turned out to be problematic. It was undoubtedly a bottleneck in the infrastructure, and fees were charged regardless of usage.

Also, there were repeated situations when the infrastructure could not cope (especially with a rapid increase of traffic), which caused problems with access to websites.

Faced with so many difficulties, it became necessary to choose a hosting better suited to the modern requirements of a changing market and a dynamically developing company.

A decision was made to switch to the cloud, and the main goals were:

• improving the quality of services provided,
• independence from the hardware layer.

It was important for the team to freely allocate resources as the number of customers grows, and traffic or load increases. Infrastructure maintenance costs were also significant.

After researching the market, Netkoncept.com decided to cooperate with the Polish cloud - Oktawave.

When we're looking for a supplier, it was very important for us to locate the data center in Poland due to the specific nature of our services. Tests of several Polish cloud providers have shown that the Oktawave infrastructure offers the highest compute performance and lowest disk latency.

Katarzyna Kowalska, Marketing Manager at Netkoncept.com

MIGRATION

Before the migration, the company's infrastructure was based on two servers with similar parameters, i.e. a dual-core Intel Xeon 5148LV processor with 4 MB cache, clocked at 2.33 GHz, 16 GB RAM and many disks:

• 146 GB, SAS, 2.5", 10,000 RPM,
• 146 GB, SAS, 2.5", 10,000 RPM,
• 146 GB, SAS, 2.5", 10,000 RPM,
• 300 GB, SAS, 3.5", 15,000 RPM,
• 300 GB, SAS, 3.5", 15,000 RPM.

The infrastructure was supplemented by Veritas tape drives and an additional backup of key components to an external data center. All the old infrastructure has been replaced with two instances in the Oktawave cloud. The first one, dedicated to the web server, had eight vCPUs (each instance processor is clocked at 2.5 GHz) and 8 GB RAM.

The second instance, which has been intended to act as a database server, has four vCPUs and four gigabytes of RAM. Everything is supported by the Oktawave Load Balancer.

IMPLEMENTATION STAGES:

• Analysis of current resources
• Appropriate selection of the parameters of the new environment (in Oktawave there are 24 hardware configurations), installation and configuration of the SkyCMS application
• Tests
• Launch of the new websites in the new infrastructure
• Migration of the several hundred currently functioning websites

At the end of 2014, the company migrated its entire old infrastructure to the Oktawave cloud, and the number of instances increased from two to eleven with different parameters.

BUSINESS BENEFITS

Migration from dedicated servers to the cloud has improved, among others, performance and security. All the assumed goals were achieved. First of all, the company gained independence from the hardware layer and minimized the risk of hardware failure.

Cloud migration optimized the infrastructure maintenance costs thanks to the billing model (payment only for used resources). The company stopped buying the equipment as a spare and also delegating people to modernize and maintain it. All operations are carried out in the Administration Panel, and the effect of the changes can be seen after a few minutes.

Access to unlimited resources allows the company to freely develop its portfolio of services. It is worth mentioning the EBO365 project, the Electronic Citizen's Office, which allows dealing with official matters via the Internet. Another project, SOD365 (modern and easy-to-use Document Circulation System integrated with ePUAP and E-Archive) enables offices and public institutions to archive documents.

After migrating to Oktawave, we became independent from the hardware layer. We were able to focus on the development of our proprietary SkyCMS system and launching new products and services. We have constant access to the resources we need, both for development/testing purposes and for providing new services.

Katarzyna Kowalska, Marketing Manager at Netkoncept.com