Challenges
and objectives
SURF replaces the network infrastructure every six years with newer, faster, and more advanced technology and was looking for the best way to achieve this.
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Mission
- SURF is a cooperative association of Dutch educational and research institutions in which its members join forces.
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Industry
- Education and research
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Location
- Utrecht, Netherlands
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Description
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Driving innovation together. That is the mission of SURF. SURF ensures that the education and research community has access to the finest and newest ICT facilities for top research and talent development. Within SURF, universities, universities of applied science, senior secondary vocational institutions (MBO), UMCs and research institutions work together to purchase or develop the best possible digital services and to stimulate knowledge sharing by continuing to innovate.
''Our goal is to make sure learning, studying and conducting research is easier, quicker and most importantly limitless.''
Eyle Brinkhuis, SURF NFV specialist.
Services provided to Surf
Infrastructure design
We designed the cloud infrastructure with a strong focus on working closely together with the SURF engineer and architect teams.
Cloud design
Together, we tuned the design of the Open source cloud to the required specifications and size to run on-site, in the SURF's data center.
Build
At a later stage, new technologies and functionalities can be added to the environment, such as Kubernetes & MANO.
Managing the infrastructure
Fairbanks OpenStack experts built the cloud and handed over management and monitoring to the Managed Services support teams.
Transfer the infrastructure
Additionally, Fairbanks added networking functionality by developing a VPP and Tacker Charm specialized for SURF.
Handover
However, if SURF decides their own team is ready to control their cloud, we will train the team to ensure a smooth handover.
VPP and
perfomance
SURF wanted to add an open-source framework, which offers the functionality of network switches or routers to the open infrastructure.
SURF researched several solutions like Sriov and DPDK, but eventually chose VPP. The three main reasons to do this are the following.
- The possibility for live migration functionality.
- The efficiency in which VPP uses network recourses.
- The VPP performance (1.2 Terrabytes through a server). When adding VPP to the Open Infrastructure, SURF found out that finetuning was key to reach the best possible network efficiency.
- The VPP performance (1.2 Terrabytes through a server). When adding VPP to the Open Infrastructure, SURF found out that finetuning was key to reach the best possible network efficiency.
“At this moment we are able to process 70GB per host. But we see that we are still able to improve the infrastructure so expect to process 90GB to 100GB per host”.
Eyle Brinkhuis, SURF NFV specialist.
About
Fairbanks
Fairbanks provides training, consultancy, emergency assistance and managed services for open infrastructure solutions like OpenStack, Kubernetes and open networking.
Why choose Fairbanks as your partner for your open-source infrastructure?
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According to SURF
- ''Fairbanks is persistent and knowledgable in Nova, VPP and other aspects of OpenStack. As in the development of most new solutions we ran into some difficulties but Fairbanks always continued.''
- ''''Fairbanks was the party in The Netherlands that had the widest and most knowledge about open source cloud infrastructure to make this a successful project''.
- ''We don't manage the environment ourselves. Fairbanks is specialized in managing an open infrastructure cloud environment. That is a huge benefit to us. We don't have to worry about it''.
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Eyle Brinkhuis, SURF NFV specialist.
Work with
Fairbanks
We would love to get in touch with you to hear your thoughts and questions. Feel free to leave us a message here.
