GxP Cloud Services

GxP
Cloud
Services
Use Cases Example
Introduction
The following uses case are intended to illustrate a small number of possible scenarios in
which the services provided by Cloudlynx could be used by a customer. Each scenario
describes a problem and requirements faced by a fictional company’s IT staff, and a
possible solution using Cloudlynx services.
This document is not intended to be an exhaustive list of such scenarios and use cases.
Additionally, it should not be assumed that the solutions given are limited to type or size
of company described in each scenario.
Finally, please note that the solutions provided are intended to be indicative and are not
complete, ready-to-implement technical solutions.
About us
Datalynx was founded in 1996 in Basel, Switzerland in order to meet the informatics
needs of both multi-national and local organizations
Datalynx Group is focused on providing IT services mostly to regulated industries, such
as pharmaceutical and banking industry. It provides services connected mainly with GxP
Compliance and Cloud Services.
Cloudlynx as a member of Datalynx Group is a company dedicated to serve Cloud
solutions to our clients. It consists of professionals in cloud services area as well as
compliance and regulatory area.
Datalynx, s.r.o. Na Strži 1702/65, Praha, 14000
+420 775 509 870 www.datalynx.cz Scenario 1: 3D Widgets
Company Description
3D Widgets is a small company specialising in 3D graphics and visualisation, and working
from a single office location. Bob, the systems administrator, has already outsourced the
company’s commodity IT systems, such as email and document storage, to the
Software-as-a-Service offering “Microsoft Office 365”.
Problem
As part of its graphics and visualisation work the company requires a significant amount
of computational power to render imagery created by its artists, which is presently
provided by a large number of in-house servers – a “render farm”. As this render farm
runs highly specialised software, is frequently reconfigured, and central to the company’s
business, it wishes to retain complete control over its configuration and management.
However the render farm is not used all of the time and the company has found the
expense of maintaining this system and purchasing upgrades to be a burden. The owner
of the company has asked Bob to reduce the cost of operating the render farm.
Additionally, while the render farm lies idle most of the time, when it is used the
company’s artists are finding that it does not provide sufficient capacity to meet their
needs. The artists have asked Bob to provide significantly more render farm capacity.
Solution
To address the seemingly mutually exclusive goals of the reducing the cost and
increasing the capacity of the render farm, Bob chooses to use the Infrastructure-as-aService provider Cloudlynx. Doing so will allow Bob to retain complete control over the
configuration of the render farm, as he will have full and sole administration rights over
any instances he starts.
Bob can also satisfy the requirement to reduce costs by terminating the instances that
make up the render farm at times when it is not in use.
He can additionally satisfy the artists request for additional capacity adjusting sizing the
render farm’s instances, the quantity of instances, and the size of its storage as required
and on-demand.
Outline Implementation
Bob begins by creating a JSON template describing the configuration of a render farm,
including details of the required instances, storage, and networking. Bob can now
reliable and automatically create and re-create the render farm on Cloudlynx at will.
Additionally, Bob can create multiple the render farms simultaneously with minimal
effort. He can also adjust the template to create different sizes and configurations of
render farm as required.
Bob could now start render farms as requested, or alternatively provide the artists with
access to start their own, private render farms on-demand.
Cloudlynx Products Used
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•
•
•
Compute Instances
Networking
Outbound Data Transfer
Object and/or Block Storage
Datalynx, s.r.o. Na Strži 1702/65, Praha, 14000
+420 775 509 870 www.datalynx.cz Scenario 2: Structural Widgets
Company Description
Structural Widgets is a mid-sized engineering company with several hundred employees
across over a dozen offices. The company’s management do not like the idea of handing
over complete control of the company’s IT systems to outside contractors and prefer to
retain an in-house systems administrator, Alice, to manage the company’s systems,
which are already highly virtualised. They have however used colocation facilities in the
past to host public facing systems such as web servers.
Problem
As the company has grown its IT systems have remained centralised at its headquarters,
however having all the servers in one location led to a company-wide outages when
power or internet connectivity have been interrupted. Additionally the company has
found it difficult keep pace with the growing performance and capacity requirements of
the business.
Alice has been asked the director to find a solution which will ensure 24/7 availability of
the company’s IT systems and enable the systems performance and capacity to be
scaled flexibly as the business grows. Alice has been given a budget for capital
expenditures to achieve this, however the budget is insufficient to fund the construction
of new server rooms in other offices and the purchase of large numbers of additional
servers.
Solution
Alice approaches these requirements by migrating the company’s IT systems into
Cloudlynx’s IaaS cloud. By making use of Cloudlynx’s multiple data centres and resilient,
replicated storage offerings, Alice can provide both high availability and disaster
recovery.
By making use of the template and automation tools available in Cloudlynx, Alice can
scale the performance and capacity of the company’s systems rapidly and with minimal
effort.
As Cloudlynx charges on a pay-as-you-go basis, Alice does not need a large capital
expenditure budget to fund this new setup and can indeed reduce the company’s IT
costs in the long run by scaling down systems to a minimal capacity at times when there
is low utilisation, such at night or on public holidays.
Outline Implementation
Alice begins by converting copies of her existing VMWare virtual machines (VM) to the
KVM VM format required for Cloudlynx using the free tools provided by the KVM project.
Her VMs can now be imported into Cloudlynx and started as instances within the IaaS
cloud. After also creating the networking and storage required for her systems, Alice can
start a full replica of her in-house systems in the IaaS cloud, and migrate the company’s
data and users to the new cloud environment.
For the larger offices, Alice chooses to deploy local “cache” servers which store copies of
frequently used files locally for improved performance, while synchronising any changes
or additions back to the cloud for safe storage.
Cloudlynx Products Used
•
•
•
•
Compute Instances
Networking
Outbound Data Transfer
Block Storage
Datalynx, s.r.o. Na Strži 1702/65, Praha, 14000
+420 775 509 870 www.datalynx.cz Scenario 3: Event Widgets
Company Description
Event Widgets is a large event management company with over a thousand employees
and office locations in multiple countries. The company maintains a dedicated IT staff
lead by Eve, the CIO. Eve’s team manage a collection of in-house IT systems spread
across the company’s offices.
Problem
After a flood at the head office caused significant damage to the basement server room
the company discovered that its disaster recovery procedures were inadequate, resulting
in significant IT service outages and data loss. Consequently, disaster recovery has
become a major concern for the board of directors.
The CEO has asked Eve to develop a new disaster recovery strategy which can function
independently of any of in-house server rooms, and which can survive the loss of
multiple office locations. Whilst this project it a high priority for the company, it
presently lacks the funds to make significant investments in hardware and facilities.
Solution
Eve’s new DR strategy utilises a “pilot light” approach where by her team will maintain a
replica of the company’s files and databases in on off-site location, and will start up a full
disaster recovery environment when required. This approach requires that the off-site
location be able to provide significant numbers of virtual machines on a few minutes’
notice, and so Eve has chosen to use the Cloudlynx IaaS cloud as the off-site location.
This will enable Eve to provide rapid disaster recovery which is independent of the
company’s offices and in-house server rooms without incurring significant and on-going
costs.
Outline Implementation
Eve’s team begin by setting up instances in the IaaS cloud to receive replicas of file
server data and database content. They configure the in-house servers to continually
replicate the data stored in-house to these new cloud instances.
The team then create and test JSON templates describing the instances, storage, and
networking required to replace the in-house servers for each office location where
servers are installed. They also prepare images and snapshots of these servers in the
IaaS cloud.
In the event of a disaster, Eve’s team can now recreate which ever part of their IT
infrastructure has been affected in a matter of minutes.
Cloudlynx Products Used
•
•
•
•
Compute Instances
Networking
Outbound Data Transfer
Block Storage
Datalynx, s.r.o. Na Strži 1702/65, Praha, 14000
+420 775 509 870 www.datalynx.cz Scenario 4: Pharma Widgets, IT Responsiveness
Company Description
Pharma Widgets is a multi-national pharmaceuticals company headquartered in
Switzerland. The company has a large a diverse portfolio of IT systems managed by a
large, international IT team headed by the CIO, Charlie.
Problem
Charlie has received numerous complaints from Pharma Widgets business units
regarding the responsiveness of his team. Business unit leaders are dissatisfied with IT’s
slow response to changing business requirements, such as needs for new functionality or
additional capacity. They tell Charlie that the inflexibility of the IT team is having a
negative impact on their units’ growth and development, as it prevents them from
testing potentially transformative new systems and technologies in a timely fashion.
After investigating the issue, Charlie finds that his team are being constrained by slow
procurement processes which deliver the resources needed for testing new functionality
and changes many weeks after requests are placed.
In addition, these procurement processes often require his team to commit to multi-year
contracts for any resources they request. This results in his team accepting only those
business request where they feel there is a high change of the new functionality entering
production, which effectively limits them to making small, incremental changes.
Solution
Charlie implements a new policy which allows his team to provision resources for testing
purposes in the Cloudlynx IaaS cloud. The IaaS cloud provides an environment offering
effectively unlimited resources while also being completely isolated from the corporate
network. This allows his team to test changes and new functionality without fear of
negatively impacting production systems.
Cloudlynx allows Charlie’s team to create test environments on-demand, enabling them
to respond to business requests promptly and evaluate new ideas in hours or days
instead of weeks or months. The pay-as-you-go charging model frees the team from the
long term contracts and exhaustive paperwork required by the previous procurement
process, meaning that they are more willing to accept high risk, transformative ideas for
testing.
Outline Implementation
Charlie establishes a contract with Cloudlynx under which he can request multiple
Cloudlynx “projects” be created. These projects can map to Charlie’s organisational
structure and can be assigned quotas to provide transparent and automatic limitations
on spending.
Finally, Charlie requests accounts be created for those team members he authorises to
use Cloudlynx, and assigns them to the appropriate projects.
Cloudlynx Products Used
•
•
•
Compute Instances
Networking
Object and/or Block Storage
Datalynx, s.r.o. Na Strži 1702/65, Praha, 14000
+420 775 509 870 www.datalynx.cz Scenario 5: Pharma Widgets, Data Archive
Company Description
Pharma Widgets has a dedicated archive department, which is run by Peggy. The archive
department is responsible for the long term maintenance of copies of all the company’s
documents and data to meet legal and regulatory requirements. Data stored in the
archive’s existing large, in-house storage array is retrieved only in frequently, however
when it is retrieved it usually to address a legal request or questions from regulatory
auditors. As such, the data must be available either immediately or on very short notice.
Problem
Rapid advances in technology over the last few years have to dramatic and increasing
growth in the amount of data the company generates each year. Mindful of these
technological advances, business units and regulators are demanding that the company
archive ever increasing percentages of its data, and maintain these archives for longer
periods.
As a result Peggy requires ever more storage for the archive, however she is expected to
satisfy these demands within a flat or decreasing budget.
Additionally, the board of directors require her to satisfy the company’s ISECO that any
solution she chooses offers a sufficiently high level of security to ensure that the
company’s sensitive, private data is not disclosed without authorisation.
Solution
Rather than purchase additional large, costly storage arrays from traditional vendors
Peggy choses to switch to a cloud-based solution using Cloudlynx’s IaaS cloud.
Unlike the traditional storage arrays, which require her to purchase capacity in advance,
the IaaS cloud charges here only for space she uses, and only as she uses. The cloud
storage is also significantly cheaper than the traditional storage arrays, allowing her to
meet the archive’s growing space requirements without budget increases.
Cloudlynx’s high level of security and regulatory certification also enables here to satisfy
the security requirements of the company’s ISECO.
Outline Implementation
Peggy uploads files which are to be archived into the IaaS cloud’s object storage system.
This allows here to upload unlimited quantities of data without having to consider
restrictions imposed by conventional file systems. It also allows her to select any object
storage-aware document management system she wishes to act as a front-end user
interface, and to place this on in-house servers.
Optionally, Peggy can use object expiration to set when in the future any files she
uploads should be deleted at the time that they’re uploaded. This ensures that files are
only kept for as long as is legally required and are promptly and automatically deleted
once they have expired.
Cloudlynx Products Used
•
•
Outbound Data Transfer
Object Storage
Datalynx, s.r.o. Na Strži 1702/65, Praha, 14000
+420 775 509 870 www.datalynx.cz

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