ALP Cloud

ALP Cloud is ALP Group cloud, is under permanent management of STsMK "Argus" — expert service of the centralized monitoring and control of the IC. Service beforehand reveals the approaching IT problems and incidents and issues optimal recommendations about their elimination (for example, on prevention of performance penalty of 1C systems, CRM, EDMS). Services on the basis of ALP Cloud provide a complex of the tools proposing the non-standard solution of the sharp IT tasks connected with business continuity.

ALP Cloud is a service basis "Hybrid IT infrastructure at the price traditional". It is aimed, first of all, at averages (about 500 jobs) and large (over 1000 jobs) commercial enterprises, the state organizations and departments. Both categories of customers have an opportunity to increase scalability, otkazo-, and under certain conditions and disaster tolerance of an information system, its capability to provide business continuity.

According to ALP Group, thanks to transition from traditional to hybrid infrastructure on "warm" "more hotly" to schemes the small enterprises have an opportunity to easily predict expenses on IT. An opportunity to pass to otkazo-and to disaster-proof IT solutions is important for the organizations of the average size. Quick start of IT projects, costs for which were not budgeted, and implementation of short-term projects for which creation of IT infrastructure according to corporate standards is irrational is most interesting to large enterprises (Enterprise segment).

The cloud of ALP Cloud is a basis for the whole family of IT services of the company: vendor technical support of a line OS Alt (developer: BaseALT) and DBMS Postgres Pro (developer: Postgres Professional); service of stenting of import-substituting products; and also open "bus" of technical support for the Russian developers of the backbone SOFTWARE enterprise level.

ALP Cloud supports work of the SaaS-applications for the pharmaceutical industry (development of the Vivanti company entering into ALP Group). Besides, the technology platform which is automatically tracing performance of business applications, critical for clients of ALP Group ("sheaves" 1C: Enterprise and DBMS, CRM, CLM) and also readiness of IT infrastructures of corporate customers for scaling acts on its base.

2018: The automated analysis and continuous optimization of IaaS-resources

On February 1, 2018 the ALP Group company announced the beginning of providing the service "The automated analysis and continuous optimization (sayzing) of IaaS-resources" allowing the enterprise to reduce rent expenses of cloud services by 25-45%. At the same time remains as the performance level of application and IT and infrastructure software set by the company, and a reserve of resources on a case of peak loads.

Service scope — software, written not for cloud computing architectures, and for work on own equipment: ERP, EDMS, many the CRM system, specialized industry IT solutions (for example, for medicine, a financial or oil and gas sector) and also inherited by software. Thanks to service of a sayzing of resources in IaaS this software actually receives autoscaling function. The service of ALP Group does not require to remake software under programming interfaces (API) of the specific IaaS-platform.

The service is applicable to any IaaS-resources. To Russian (proprietary, free) and to the western proprietary software. And also to software which develops within the international Open Source-проектов.

ALP Group service automatically reveals the changed requirement of the companies for IaaS-resources. Also allows to bring quickly their real consumption into exact accord with guaranteed sufficient level for maintenance of the necessary performance of the infrastructure and/or application software.

Relying on the received estimates, the customer can independently reconfigure an IaaS-resource – to add or reduce the computing power, RAM, volume of disk storages, it is more correct to redistribute resources between applications. The mode when all these operations are performed automatically — on the basis of the rules set by the administrator is provided. In both cases adjustment goes both towards growth, and towards resource consumption reduction.

If resource consumption decreases, the benefit of the customer is connected with transition to cheaper tariff plans and/or with an opportunity to use the released cloud resources for the solution of other tasks. At increase in need for IaaS-resources pluses for the customer consist in improvement of quality of operation of applications. And in disposal of existing and potential "bottlenecks" - till the moment when resource shortage negatively influences work of users. Thus, the service increases satisfaction of users and quality of business processes. At the same time expenses of the enterprise customer on scaling of IaaS-service are always minimum.

The performance level of software can be controlled on the basis of objective data. This method is connected using a technique of APDEX for assessment of actual speed of operation of the IC from the point of view of the user (whether there corresponds the actual duration of execution of operations to their normative values, what degree of satisfaction of users).

The service "The automated analysis and continuous optimization (sayzing) of IaaS-resources" is based on a stack of mature Open Source-products (Elasticsearch: storage of structure and configurations program and hardware, magazines of applications, results of trace; InfluxDB: preprocessing of metrics; Telegraph: data collection from Linux and UNIX-INFRASTRUCTURES; Graphana: visualization of problem areas). Also the service relies on the platform of STsMK "Argus" which forms a basis of the service allowing to control in a complex health of an information system. Thanks to it the service of a sayzing of resources in IaaS not only performs the basic function, but also can be a part of more large-scale corporate system of continuous monitoring.

On leased IaaS-infrastructure the software agent which collects and keeps track of values of a set of the parameters which are comprehensively characterizing software performance is established. The agent can work with thousands a component, process tens of thousands of metrics from hundreds of servers. It obtains primary data directly from OS, DBMS, application programs (on the basis of the analysis of event logs or commands added to the software code), from application servers and also from software of an interface layer (middleware). Information streams are consolidated and analyzed in real time. The analysis purpose — timely identification of the moments when directly measured or calculated parameters are included into critical areas or cease to correspond to the set formal rules. Besides, the analysis allows to reveal the patterns testimonial of the fact that the downside risk of performance of business applications or infrastructure software grows. And also that there are potentially "narrow" places or hard errors at resource planning in IaaS.

2017: Doubling of resource base

On July 24 the ALP Group company announced doubling of resource base of own cloud of ALP Cloud. According to representatives of the company, changes have the balanced and complex character: rely on the resource consumption profiles confirmed with practice by different user groups and on dynamics of growth of these groups. By estimates of the company, increase in base will allow to close requirements of ALP Group for resources for the next three years.

Changes covered all essentially important elements of IT infrastructure ALP Cloud: high-performance clusters, storage systems (DWH), connection to trunk sections Internet, high-speed cross-server connections, systems capabilities of monitoring and infrastructure management.

As explained in ALP Group, doubling of ALP Cloud resource base, first of all, is connected with fast and steady increase in demand for service "Hybrid IT infrastructure at the price traditional". This growth by 1.3 times exceeded planned targets on the last quarter 2016 and the first half of the year 2017. In this flow most quickly (for 50% in comparison with the same period of last year) requests for fault tolerance according to the scheme of "a warm reserve" which allows the enterprise to turn the existing IT infrastructure into fault-tolerant grow.

The customer base of ALP Group also shows increase in a flow of requests for the softwares new fault-tolerant configurations and the equipment. According to the company, this growth is observed the last five quarters. Besides, the perspective group is made by the projects requiring high-quality implementation and support of IT solutions based on the Russian software and developments of the international community of Open Source.

"A considerable part of requests (45%) proceeds from supplier companies of services in the field of accounting, audit, taxation and legal support. The fault tolerance and availability of IT infrastructure, work from any place and (24/7) — with minimum possible idle times is extremely important at any time for them — noted in ALP Group. — One more important group (40%) is made by the companies for which development of IT infrastructure of traditional type too expensive. They would like to use widely modern tools, for example, a continuous sayzing of resources in IaaS, monitoring of requirement of the company for resources, and at the same time as much as possible to save former investments into IT infrastructure. On the third place (15%) — requests of the enterprises aiming to protect themselves from any risks which are followed by sudden destruction of IT infrastructure and intended and in this situation to save capability to a full-fledged work of crucial business applications and communication services".