In terms of revenue, Spain is the largest market outside of France for the Orange Group, one of the world’s leading telecommunications operators, with more than 278 million customers. With a project based on innovation, convergence and value generation, it is currently the second operator in the Spanish telecommunications market and one of the main foreign investors in the country.
To complete its new digital transformation project, the telecommunications operator required a platform to house the IT services within your Network business unitthat was robust, flexible and minimized deployment times.
as you remember Luis Cano, Head of the Telco-Cloud Engineering group at Orange, “the company’s proposal was to offer infrastructure services with a provision portal where our internal customers, network engineering teams and solution providers could deploy their services.”
Orange also needed to expedite the consumption of its technological resources, so that it could optimize investment through solutions that made it possible to adjust the availability of these resources dynamically, based on the needs and demand of its customers.
A private cloud environment
In this sense, Luis Cano confirms that, although “the virtualization of our own telco products was already covered by other environments, we had a space to cover for systems that, even being of the IT type, are typical of telco services or complement them. In addition, we needed to cover systems that did not have their life cycle automated. With this in mind, we came to the conclusion that a private cloud environment met those needs.”
Due to the criticality of the type of applications that needed to be virtualized and the fact that the company could not afford delays or failures to mature in deployments and production, Orange decided to put the start-up of its business in the hands of HPE and VMware. new private cloud environment.
Once Orange transfers to HPE the need to launch a private cloud to provide a better service to its internal customers, the American multinational studies the operator’s proposal and channels it through its Professional Services. This is how HPE recommends Orange to have the modular chassis infrastructure for this platform HPE Synergywhich ensures growth in line with demand and provides the solution with unique features, as well as an HPE 3PAR array solution that provides robustness and stability to the platform with one of the best architectures on the market.
By vmwarein the first phase of this ambitious digital transformation project, propose the implementation of one of the firm’s best-known products: vSphere. For the second and more ambitious phase of this project, VMware recommends the deployment of VMware NSX-T and vRealize Suitewhich allows increasing the agility of Orange, providing the provisioning capacity with a single click and providing flexibility and scalability by consolidating all network and security functions on a single platform.
Flexibility in a cloud that transforms
For Luis Cano, the interesting thing about HPE Synergy in this case it is that it was presented as an integrated solution that “allowed us to bring the concept of virtualization even closer to the level of the hardware itself. The integrated management and the possibility of unified configuration from a single system provided added value within the management of the infrastructure life cycle”. On the other hand, it also highlights that adding a solution based on storage cabins HP 3PAR, “It gave us the guarantee of working with a safe and reliable system, with the levels of availability necessary for this type of environment.”
On the other hand, the advantage that Orange obtained by choosing VMware NSX-T and vRealizeSuite was that “this project incorporated the concept of a network managed by software and an orchestrator that largely automated all these processes. With this, we significantly reduce the risks in all these interventions and, in many cases, we can carry them out at more convenient times for the engineers. Automation provides us with greater speed, homogeneity and quality in deployments”.
Coupled with the centralization of hardware management provided by HPE solutions “we have significantly reduced the risk of failures and execution times. Additionally, we have been able to provide internal customers with a benefit that they were unaware of until now: the self-management of their systems within the cloud through a specific portal for their applications”, he concludes.
You can consult the complete case study here (PDF – Video)
