Caravan Aero

The center of cloud solutions Caravan Aero is division of Caravan telecommunication company. It specializes in providing cloud services to business, including a virtual hosting, VPS, IaaS and virtual data center. In September, 2014 the Center began to provide service "lease of cloud infrastructure" on the IaaS model. Caravan Aero works based on own DPC of Caravan company which level of reliability corresponds to TIER III+. As the main software platform for development of cloud services it uses the solution Odin – "cloud" division of Parallels company. The center of cloud solutions Caravan Aero helps to develop business about 2000 companies from SMB-and an Enterprise-segment.

Implementing cloud services selected the Parallels Automation platform from Parallels company — developer of products on virtualization and cloud automation. Parallels Automation is the solution based on which the provider can render the integrated and simple cloud services in use. The physical platform for creation of the Center of cloud solutions of Caravan Aero became own data center of Telehouse Caravan of category of reliability Tier III which meets the high requirements to reliability of functioning of IT-systems.

2017

The network mechanism - the balancer of loading

The Caravan company in partnership with software developer for the cloud orchestration of Flexiant in October, 2017 implemented in the Virtual data center (VDC) the network mechanism for more effective management of loading of servers. Now in the VDC control panel the balancer of loading who allows users to configure independently rules of balancing of the incoming traffic between virtual servers became available.

The balancer provided by Caravan company within service of VDC is developed based on the popular open source software HAProxy providing high availability, balancing of loading and proxying to TCP and HTTP-applications, by means of distribution of incoming requests for several servicing servers. Thanks to speed and reliability of this software, HAProxy it is used by such known high-loaded websites as Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, Github, Reddit, Stack Overflow, etc.

The balancer is integrated into a control panel of Virtual data center (VDC) Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator and provides four algorithms of setup: Round robin, Least connections, Source and URI.

According to Alexander Mirocha, the technical lead of cloud projects of Caravan company, the new possibility of flexible management by network traffic of the selected virtual servers and distributions of loading between them is especially important for web resources with a large number of clients and geographically (territorially) distributed servers. For business of these resources the question of ensuring fault tolerance and continuity of work under heavy loads as any idle time of the server can lead to financial losses and leaving of users to competitors is especially critical. Use of the balancer gives to such clients the chance of independent setup and control of uniformity of load distribution for servers that finally reduces risks of loss of working capacity and promotes increase in fault tolerance of web service.

Performance improvement of services using Virtuozzo

The Virtuozzo company announced on August 10 cooperation increase with the Caravan Aero service provider delivering such cloud business services as virtual DPC, IaaS, VPS and a virtual hosting. Software solutions of Virtuozzo with support of virtual machines, containers and the software-defined data warehouse within a single platform allowed Caravan Aero to increase performance of the provided services to 30 times and also to offer cloud services with a quality assurance of service (SLA) and a guarantee of performance (for premium services).

In addition to traditional cloud services of Caravan Aero provides service of virtual data center (VDC) with a performance level guarantee. Thanks to containers, virtual machines and DWH in the form of hyper convergent infrastructure from Virtuozzo Caravan Aero sells high-performance services of cloud infrastructure, providing the high level of availability and flexibility.

The updated Virtuozzo platform allows to use the same equipment for placement of different loadings — traditional virtual machines, easy virtual machines, containers or creation of the data warehouse. Thanks to it IT infrastructure of the customer can be expanded by simple adding of servers, and control and management happens via the single console — Alexey Kobets, the senior vice president for development of Virtuozzo noted. — There are opportunities for increase in return from the existing equipment which our old clients, Caravan Aero company seized.

Transition to the version of the Virtuozzo 7 platform allowed provider to optimize service, to exclude purchase costs of the expensive specialized equipment and to provide the different service levels to clients on demand. An opportunity for work on servers of standard architecture and also full redundancy of data in storage or economical protection with Erasure Coding allowed to reduce in addition the cost of services for improving competitiveness in the market. Due to fast recovery and restart of containers and VM in case of failure and use of technology of updating of security systems without restart of workflows of Virtuozzo ReadyKernel the minimum levels of idle time of infrastructure are reached, claim in Virtuozzo.

Virtuozzo provides flexible, purely software solution. It is started on any servers and gives an opportunity to start both containers, and virtual machines in one environment, optimizing use of a system. The software integrates data storage resources in the general pool to lower costs at placement both volume databases in fast SSD storages, and "easy" network applications in storages of the standard level — Alexander Miroch, the technical director of Caravan Aero said.

2015: Virtual data center, VDC

The center of cloud solutions Caravan Aero in September, 2015 started service – virtual data center, or VDC. It is focused not only on SMB-, but also on the Enterprise-companies. The technology basis of VDC is formed by the solutions of global manufacturers (Cisco, Intel, etc.) placed in physical DPC of Caravan Aero. At the same time for the organization of virtual environment the Odin platform is used (before Parallels); for creation and management of cloud services – software of the English developer Flexiant.

The virtual data center of Caravan Aero is implemented on the IaaS model (infrastructure as service). But unlike classical IaaS-service it gives broader functionality and thinner network settings for work with virtual resources. Application of VDC will allow customers of Caravan Aero to reduce their operating costs at least by 25%. Users of classical IaaS-service of Caravan Aero achieved such effect, it agrees to survey conducted by the company.

With VDC it is not necessary to buy the new equipment for development of IT infrastructure, to pay power supply, work of IT specialists and the round-the-clock technical support. Clients will pay only for actually used virtual resources which were required to them.

The virtual data center of Caravan Aero is an optimal variant for large and non-standard projects. It is important that it opens for clients of an opportunity who are demanded, but in a complex are so far poorly available in the Russian market. For example: to independently increase and reduce the volume of the provided virtual resources;

• develop computer centers from images of any virtual machines (raw, qcow2, ova, vmdk, img, EZos and iso);
• create the IT infrastructures isolated from each other;
• integrate with each other the IT infrastructures constructed based on virtual and physical DPCs;

protect cloud infrastructure from DDoS attacks.

The technology basis of VDC is in own way unique. Its hardware-software part is provided by solutions of the known global manufacturers (Cisco, Intel, Odin, etc.). These solutions are placed in own physical DPC of Caravan which level of reliability corresponds to TIER III+ according to international standard TIA-942.

Operational creation, management, change and monitoring of cloud services and also their billing are implemented using Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator – the solution Flexiant, the English software supplier for management of clouds. Caravan Aero selected Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator for its ample functional and integration opportunities. Being one of the most flexible, reliable, scalable and complex platforms for management of a cloud in the market, Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator allows Caravan Aero to provide the most different configurations of virtual infrastructure for corporate users".

For the organization of virtual environment on the basis of which cloud services are provided Caravan Aero uses a software platform of Odin Virtuozzo (before Parallels Cloud Server). It is the product Odin – "cloud" division of Parallels company – the international leader in the field of creation of software for virtualization which development centers are in Russia.