KPN has setup an OpenStack platform with their own infrastructure teams to prepare the organization and suppliers for virtualizing and containerization of the telco applications. Fairbanks performed an independent review of the technical readiness of such a platform for telecom applications and advised on the models how to combine and integrate experts from KPN and their infra and telco suppliers to optimize operational excellence as well as innovation power.
Voxbone is a cloud communications (IaaS) company based in Brussels (Belgium), London (United Kingdom), Los Angeles and San Francisco (California). Voxbone enables telephony applications such as conferencing and contact centers to receive phone calls, text messages and faxes in 55+ countries. The company’s services are accessed through a web portal or REST API. Voxbone networking services are delivered over a private IP network that interconnects with local phone networks in the countries where it operates. To provide infrastructure and network services near their customers, Fairbanks helped designing, implementing and improving an edge infrastructure based on OpenStack.
Open and Flexible datacenter networking solutions by Delta
Delta, founded in 1971, is a global leader in power and thermal management solutions. With its mission statement “To provide innovative, clean and energy-efficient solutions for a better tomorrow,” Delta focuses on addressing key environmental issues such as global climate change. As an energy-saving solutions provider with core competencies in power electronics and automation, Delta’s business categories include Power Electronics, Automation, and Infrastructure.
“To truly achieve flexibility for our customers while similtanuously achieving minimal power consumption, we realized advanced orchestration of system and networking resources are key. That’s why we wanted to be able to integrate the OpenStack Cloud platform and Open Networking in our solutions.” Milo Tseng, Director of Business Development of Delta Electronics in the Europe, Middle East & Africa (EMEA) region, says. “Together with our technology partners such as Fairbanks we designed and implemented this private cloud infrastructure already successfully at a customer of Delta, a fast growing customer in security in Northern Africa,”
“The cooperation with Fairbanks was very adequate and smooth. From the start of the project to the delivery of the platform we worked together as one team. That enabled us to learn more about both the implementation and the platform itself. The consultants also were very open and clear about what they were doing and about the current status of the project. We expect to deliver many more of these agile and efficient cloud solutions in the datacenter centers of our customers.”
Milo Tseng – Director of Business Development
Sandvine is a leading provider of intelligent broadband network solutions for fixed and mobile operators. Sandvine’s network policy control solutions are deployed in more than 300 networks in over 100 countries, serving hundreds of millions of data subscribers worldwide. Sandvine offers unparalleled, actionable insight into Internet traffic on CSPs network of all sizes. The Network Policy Control applications give CSPs the flexibility to enable new and innovative services, engage with subscribers on real time through a variety of channels, protect the network from malicious threats and improve the Quality of Experience of the network.
“In order to deploy products at the largest tier-1 networks globally, the continuous improvement of quality and efficiency of our applications is paramount.” Says Alex Rutgers of Sandvine: “To continuously enhance our software development process, we have implemented a centralized development environment for our OutReach product. With Fairbanks we found a skillful partner to augment our internal cloud expertise. The optimization of our Cloud infrastructure enables Sandvine to continue delivering carrier grade applications to our CSP customers worldwide.”
Alex Rutgers – AVP Engineering
The University of Luxembourg hosts big data services with OpenStack.
In research projects all over Europe, valuable data are generated but usually remain local and lack a broader use. ELIXIR, the European infrastructure for life science information, aims to provide access to this wealth of bioinformatics tools and biological data. ELIXIR-LU, the Luxembourgish ELIXIR node, hosts big data services for Translational Medicine data: the integration of clinical information with molecular and cellular data that to gain a better understanding of diseases. This data bridges the gap between the molecular level findings from the laboratory and the clinical observations and applications. The readdressing of previously generated translational data to new research questions dramatically saves time and costs of medical research.
“Nowadays a major hurdle in the use of biomedical data by a wider research community is the lack of suitable data management systems that collect and integrate all types of data. Due to the sensitive nature of these data and the security requirements, handling access can also be quite complex. To provide solutions ELIXIR-LU has developed and hosts a repository for high quality Translational Medicine Data. The platform combines high-performance and highly secured data access and computing services. The platform for efficient data access and analysis is powered by our Ubuntu OpenStack Private Cloud, that was built and is supported by Fairbanks. We can orchestrate, provision and manage this cloud with tooling such as MAAS, Juju and Landscape.”
Dr. Christophe Trefois, Dipl.-Ing.
Every day millions of people around the world depend on TomTom to make smarter decisions. TomTom designs and develops innovative products for portable navigation devices, automotive Connected Navigation Systems, Highly Automated Driving and fleet management that make it easy for people to keep moving towards their goals. Best known for being a global leader in navigation and mapping products, TomTom also creates GPS sports watches, as well as state-of-the-art fleet management solutions and industry-leading location-based products. To fuel a continuous stream of improvements and innovations, TomTom builds on a growth- and performance-oriented culture that embraces teamwork, the drive for excellence, mobility and empowerment of employees. To facilitate this, Fairbanks developed for TomTom, based on the Canonical software suite, a specific office automation environment to be able to deliver the Ubuntu desktops for the employees in a fast, efficient and a controlled way.
“Fairbanks automated the process for deployment and monitoring of Ubuntu clients for our engineers and developers worldwide. Including the installation of specific software for specific individual developers or groups of developers. Fairbanks also integrated keeping the software updated continuously, rapidly, reliably and repeatedly, at low risk and with minimal manual overhead using native Canonical tooling. Thus enabling our development teams to focus on creating value for our customers without interruptions. We are very happy with the result as well as the swift and agile manor in which Fairbanks realized the results in collaboration with our system engineers. Creating the value we needed, in time and on budget. A great example of the way we like to work ourselves at TomTom.”
Bart Verlinde – Sr. Mgr. Employee Technology Engineering in IT
Fingent is a Global IT company that crafts strategic IT business solutions enabling business success. The main office is based in White Plains, New York.
“Since our inception in 2003, we have pioneered custom solutions that have become central components in our client’s business success. Our vast technology and industry expertise enables us to partner with clients to deliver sophisticated solutions rapidly and on budget. For us, it is not only about delivering IT services, but also about playing a part in business efforts to shape a brighter and smarter future. In 2016 we started our first OpenStack implementation. We had some questions about the implementation and contacted Fairbanks to assist us in completing the proof of concept. Although they are based overseas, they reacted very fast and consistent. Even when we needed input from our technical resources based in Kochi, India, we planned and managed the collaboration accross three time zones. We worked together completely offsite via a conference system and after the first support, Fairbanks helped us to take the next steps. Fairbanks supported us with designing a new production deployment in the Marlborough, Massachusetts Tierpoint Datacenter and also helped with creating backups and test restores for the current ‘development OpenStack platform’ in our TierPoint Datacenter in Hawthorne, New York. The approach of Fairbanks has been extraordinary successful, and it is clear they have built up years of experience regarding OpenStack and open source software. On top of this experience, they are able to use this experience in complex projects and also to get things done. Fairbanks listened to our challenges and directly followed up on them with options for different solutions, helping Fingent creating a successful OpenStack platform which we can use within our business strategy. The support we receive was very helpful, Fairbanks is a very professional and flexible organization; a pleasure to work with.”
Omar Khan – Director of Strategic Relationships
“ActiveVideo, located at the Media Park in Hilversum, is developer of a Cloud TV solution. This is a cloud – based software platform which allows service providers, content aggregators and CE manufacturers to virtualize CPE functions in the cloud. This is part of delivering next-generation user interfaces, online content and interactive advertising to millions of TV -related connected devices. Fairbanks has been able to contribute its knowledge and expertise in the creation of the OpenStack private cloud environment. The management of the OpenStack cloud infrastructure is carried out by the IT department after Fairbanks has implemented the environment. Fairbanks also providing support on the OpenStack production environment.”
Andre Blum – Director of Engineering
Cendris Customer Contact is an expert in the field of customer contact. With 2,000 employees spread over various locations in the Netherlands and Suriname we do the customer contact for our clients. We do this at our own locations or on the location of our client (managed insourcing). We do this with home workers (home-shoring) or at very attractive fares from Suriname (offshoring). Cendris Customer Contact is a 100% subsidiary of PostNL. We are strong in Service and Sales and do so through all possible contact channels (inbound, outbound, web care, chat, email, SMS and agentless calls).
In the world of customer contact it is all about contact with people, people who live and work in a dynamic environment. All Cendris clients are unique and this certainly applies to the IT solutions used by them. Per client Cendris has to establish a customized IT infrastructure and must unlock customer specific applications.
Fairbanks has previously, commissioned by Cendris, developed a virtual desktop cloud infrastructure and provides 24*7 support on it. Each customer is furnished with a customized virtual workplace. These virtual desktops should always be available without interruption for the employees of Cendris. By using OpenStack cloud technologies, Cendris is always able to independently, immediately scale the number of virtual desktops up and down for a customer contact team as needed. This flexibility makes it possible to implement new projects very efficiently and with a short lead time.
“The solutions deployed by Fairbanks should contribute to flexibility, customized solutions for our customers and a high quality of customer contact. We work in partnership with our clients. It is very pleasant to work together with Fairbanks in this way too. We are very pleased that Fairbanks has developed a solution that meets our needs and guides us with technical cloud knowledge and advice. We trust that Fairbanks relieves us from the worries about our dynamic environment.”
Freek Weijtens – Directeur ICT Cendris
Realtime Solutions is a leader in ‘cloud-based’ logistic services. They support various high-profile customers with logistic challenges and their software performs in all processes so that they can respond quickly in the fast changing market. Their power is to implement a Warehouse Management System scalable and fast within a few days in order to have a quick return on investment.
“Realtime Solutions introduced a new Warehouse Management System, especially for the midsize market. We expect a rapid adoption due of the fast integration in the existing logistical systems. We want to offer the ability to grow rapidly without major investments. With OpenStack, Fairbanks accomplished an infrastructure that gives us the ability to scale up fast and be a public cloud provider like AWS, but with a private datacenter. With the expertise and persistence of Fairbanks, we can serve our customers so they can serve theirs.”
Harm van den Broek – Director
“The KWPN (Studbook of the Royal Dutch Sport Horse) is a Netherlands-based organization specializing in the breeding of jumpers, dressage horses, harness horses, and Gelder horses. The KWPN horse in internationally renowned for its will, its talent, athletic ability, health and character. Week after week in the Netherlands bred horses win international competitions and championships, often with foreign riders. The KWPN horse has become a very successful export product. As a Studbook with over 22,000 members and 10,000 foals every year, our administrative environment is of great importance. Both for our internal organization as for our members. At the end of both the economic as well as technical life span off our ICT infrastructure we asked Fairbanks to help us execute the replacement and modernization. Fairbanks analyzed storage, server and backup facilities and key components of the network infrastructure. We are very satisfied with the advice, delivery and methods of operation of Fairbanks.”
“Flexwebhosting delivers fast, affordable and reliable hosting services. OpenStack allows us to offer true ‘pay as you’ go hosting services beside our existing virtual private server hosting. In just a few weeks Fairbanks with Canonical installed two OpenStack clouds in our data-centers. The first is used directly for customers and is fully supported by Fairbanks and Canonical. The second environment is a test and acceptance environment for testing new developments and customer migrations. Once our service teams have gained all the necessary experience in this area, we can decide to take the production environment back in our own service. Through a unique customer portal, we give our customers the opportunity to directly create the required infrastructures and to provide and create additional hosting services such as domain name hosting, certificates and connections.”
Harrie Bouten – Directeur Flexwebhosting BV
Kuijpers is a professional technical service provider with over 950 employees and a turnover of 170 million euro. Kuijpers designs, builds and maintains technical installations in buildings and industry and contributes to a healthy working and living environment. The ambition for 2018 is to build only energy neutral and healthy installations. “Kuijpers delivers ‘ future-proof ‘ plants: plants that economize scarce resources. That is embedded in the genes of our family owned company. With our all-embracing concept we work together to achieve an environment in which people live, work and recreate together enjoyably. An environment that lives!” says Kees Nan.”Together with Fairbanks we extended this concept to the ICT infrastructure: an environment that also has to economize scarce resources, thrive in a living environment and be future-proof. We are proud that together with Fairbanks we managed to realize the expected growth on our existing SAN storage environment future proof using cloud techniques. We coupled Ceph Storage as a Software Defined Storage platform on generic hardware to our SAN environment. Ultimately, our goal with Ceph is to expand our private storage cloud on a second location to further increase the availability guarantees. We are very pleased with the guidance by Fairbanks with their technical cloud knowledge and advice on this route. Together we are already looking forward to take a next step on our path to a future-proof software defined ICT infrastructure.”
Kees Nan – IT manager
One of the customers is ODC-Noord: “The Overheids DataCenter-Noord provides datacenter and hosting services to government institutions in the North parts of the Netherlands. ODC-Noord is one of the 4 government datacenters implementing the policy of the government to consolidate the number of datacenters to 4. ODC-Noord acquires floorspace within a datacenter built by KPN. ODC-Noord has built an IT-infrastructure in this datacenter based on an OpenStack Cloud and Ceph Storage environment. As an independent expert in the field of OpenStack, Fairbanks has helped us with the auditing of the chosen architecture and design. Recently, ODC-Noord has decided to offer the participating governmental parties the hosting services also based on the community versions. To build the necessary knowledge and experience and to contribute to the development of the community versions, ODC-Noord has composed a internal development team and we sought cooperation with knowledge institutions in the North of the country. Fairbanks is one of the parties providing us with up to date knowledge in the case our own experts can’t find a solution. Fairbanks thus supports ODC-Noord to expand our hosted environment exponentially with more or less constant administrative expenses. And that’s where our customers are asking for.”
“Fairbanks did a great job training our people with OpenStack. They showed us the different cloud models and positioned OpenStack within these models and also specified the architecture, security, networking, management and storage components. The trainer had hands on experience with al the components and within a short period of time he increased the OpenStack knowledge of our team significantly”.
Charlotte Newsman – Director European Patent Office
“The Royal Dutch Pharmacists Association (Koninklijke Nederlandse Maatschappij ter bevordering der Pharmacie, KNMP) is the umbrella organisation for both professional pharmacists and the pharmacy in general, and it promotes both the interests of its members and the interests of the pharmaceutical sector in general. Because of the ‘insourcing’ of the ICT department, we asked Fairbanks to support us with the infrastructure, storage, monitoring, backup restore and virtualization environment. Also Fairbanks supported us with a service level agreement. We are very happy about the professional working methods of Fairbanks; they helped us very effiently so we can focus on our own business.”
Bill Marks – Manager ICT & Business Innovation at KNMP
“Kuehne + Nagel is a global transportation and logistics company. It offers all modes of international transport – by sea, by air and by land – and manages worldwide more than 7 million square meters of storage. In the Netherlands, a total of 2,700 employees operate at 22 different locations. Fairbanks supports us with the protection of the physical environment (‘physical security’). They designed this ‘physical security’ environment, carried out the implementations for us, and provide support when necessary. Especially the flexible approach of Fairbanks, the active involvement with our company and the fast and proper answers to our questions, for me are important elements for a long-term partnership between Kuehne + Nagel and Fairbanks.”
Teunis van Hooft – IT Business Architect
“Children living in poverty deserve to advance and prosper in life. Contributing to that together, is one of the richest things you can do in your life. World Vision listens to children and tackles the causes of poverty and injustice. We do this without making any distinction as to religion, race or political persuasion. Seeing through religious boundaries, we make a difference in nearly 100 countries and millions of lives. That’s what enables us to help the world’s most poor and vulnerable people. The ICT environment that supports us, requires specialist knowledge. At Fairbanks, this knowledge is always available. Their passion, commitment and expertise are very high compared with other companies. You can count on them in times of need. An attitude that fits well with ours. Fairbanks is a pleasant partner to do business with.”
René Noort – Controller
“Youwe stands for helping company’s succeed online. Youwe is a full service internet club. Since 2014 Youwe has an OpenStack private cloud production environment. The management of the OpenStack cloud infrastructure is carried out by the IT department. Fairbanks is because of the in-depht knowledge of OpenStack enabled to provide support to the production environment.”
Rogier Hosman – Chief Marketing Officer
“Fairbanks supported us in and advised us on the implementation of a virtual workplace. In the past, we have calculated the costs of deploying virtual desktops based on VMware. However, the impact on the SAN and server environment and the license were too large for us to decide to go forward. Fairbanks has given us a clear advice and placed a very fast and stable virtual desktop environment based on OpenStack that has also proven to be very flexible and cost efficient.”
Joost Möhlmann – Operations Manager
“The Kuiken Group is a leading full service distribution company, specialized in construction equipment, crane and material handling, recycling and port equipment in the Benelux. Kuiken has in its range brands like Volvo Construction Equipment, Sennebogen, Sandvik, Sany, Perlini and MAFI. With the offerings of the sales- and rental possibilities as well as maintenance and repair services and spare part sales, Kuiken provides her customers with ‘one stop shop’ solutions. In the years that we have worked with Fairbanks, we have found out that they work in a similar way as we do. They offer technical solutions, supported by strong brands, possess technical expertise and provide one-stop shop solutions if desired. Fairbanks takes project responsibility when needed and also supports us after the delivery of the project with support and advice. This way we have successfully carried out several migration and storage projects. The open and clear way of communicating fits well with our own culture. Fairbanks is a very flexible partner with an excellent level of knowledge.”
Servaas van der Voort – Manager ICT Kuiken Group
“Compassion International is a child-advocacy ministry that pairs compassionate people with those who are suffering from poverty. Due to the international character of the organization, the automation, networking connections and up-time are very important aspects. We have our own IT Department and Fairbanks supports them whenever we haven’t got the necessary knowledge or time available to execute our projects. The consultants of Fairbanks have always shown high level of knowledge and good resolving skills. Communication has also always run smoothly. We therefore are very pleased with Fairbanks and the services they provide.”
Klaas Jansen – Sponsor Donor Services Manager
“Weesp is a town in the Dutch province of North Holland. The town has about 18,500 inhabitants and covers an area of nearly 22 square kilometres. In the IT field we consider ourselves progressive. Since 2012 we have started an unique and enjoyable partnership with Fairbanks. Fairbanks have supported us in realizing a stable base environment and support us with the IT projects. To everyone’s satisfaction we work with Dell techniques. Poposed because they are both reliable and affordable. Fairbanks always supports us with our planned IT projects and have a no-nonsense, straightforward, clear and open advice. Without compromising on the reliability of our services, we can make our ambition as an innovative municipality organization come true.”
Marco Maij – Projectmanager / Advisor ICT
“Budgets for the IT-environment at Woonzorg Netherlands already for a long time. Nevere the less, we were searching for a flexible workplace environment. The solution has to meet our critical requirements with regard to the cost of licenses and management. Based on these criteria, Fairbanks advised us a virtual desktop infrastructure with OpenStack and implemented a basic VDI for us. They supported us during the project with answering additional questions and supplementary advice. Although Woonzorg Netherlands still has not decided whether to invest in a VDI infrastructure, we are very pleased with the insights we gained in this project and the way Fairbanks has supported us.”
Jacques Martens – Adviseur ICT RvB at Woonzorg Nederland
“AxionContinu is a healthcare organization dedicated to focused on supporting care recipients, mostly elderly, in the field of housing, (home) care, rehabilitation and recovery. Care recipients living in the city and region of Utrecht are offered high-quality care and services. Fairbanks supported us advising and implementing our storage and backup environment. Additionally they helped us determining our recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO). Fairbanks has assessed additional measures that were necessary to meet the minimum RPO and RTO. Fairbanks delivered a clear proposal which included a fair re-use of existing infrastructure components that AxionContinu many components could reuse within the existing infrastructure.”
Pierre Hogers – Manager ICT Axioncontinu
“All major ICT services are virtualized, including our ERP, Exchange- and SQL-environment. This went so quietly, no one in the organization has really noticed. The first Fail over tests have been executed and are a success. In case of a failure, ICT services can quickly be restored with the backup data. It is a compliment for the ICT staff of Ymere and the engineers of Fairbanks that these results have been achieved in less than 3 months’ time.”
Ed de Myttenaere – Manager ICT
“New housing is not just another address or a new environment. It means space for Hevoïsten to develop well. Space where collaboration and knowledge sharing is encouraged. To surprise the customer again and again with decisive and innovative solutions. The collaboration with Fairbanks is excellent. The objectives of the project were satisfactorily achieved. The collaboration was characterized by an open and honest environment in which employees of Fairbanks and Hevo could approach each other with respect and have kept sharp by each other by giving each other the right feedback. The project approach of Fairbanks is characterized by terms such as highly professional, responsible and flexible.”
Hans Stans – Manager ICT
“The cooperation between Espria Foundation and Fairbanks is characterized by adapting to changing situation. First Fairbanks supplied hardware and software. Later on Fairbanks supported the implementation and management of the datacenter with relevant expertise and knowledge. With every new situation, Fairbanks helped us to find the best solution to contribute to the success of Espria.”
Olav Palm – Manager IT Shared Service Center Espria
KPN has setup an OpenStack platform with their own infrastructure teams to prepare the organization and suppliers for virtualizing and containerization of the telco applications. Fairbanks performed an independent review of the technical readiness of such a platform for telecom applications and advised on the models how to combine and integrate experts from KPN and their infra and telco suppliers to optimize operational excellence as well as innovation power.
