Local users steal the spotlight at OpenStack Day Benelux

A sold out crowd at the OpenStack Day Benelux welcomed familiar faces from around the world, including Ruud Harmsen and Monty Taylor. But the theme of the event was clear: emphasizing local use cases and adoption.

Those local users — including several hosting providers and a cloud TV solution — took center stage in the auditorium of conference center Spant! in Bussum, North Holland. This was the second time around for the second OpenStack Benelux Conference, held in September. The first edition in 2014 earned accolades with more than 350 participants. With 29 percent growth this year, the event is heading towards a standing ovation — and a larger venue in 2016.

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The crowd at OpenStack Day Benelux 2015, photo courtesy Fairbanks NV

The goal of the event is for all participants, whether developers, engineers, resellers, service suppliers, administrators or decision makers, to update their knowledge, expand their OpenStack network and take the next step with OpenStack. Some of the leading figures in the global OpenStack community were present, including John Zannos and Allison Randal, and local success stories also emerged from the event.

User story 1: Innovation as a business driver

The first user story presented at the conference was the OpenStack journey of Cyso, a managed hosting provider focused on delivering mission-critical internet infrastructure and professional corporate services. It provides custom solutions and management for complex, business-critical platforms and applications. At the Benelux Conference, Tjebbe de Winter, Cyso’s technical director, gave a keynote with John Zannos of Canonical. De Winter was thrilled to inform a rapt audience that Cyso plans to launch its public OpenStack cloud, Fuga. Cyso is one of the first hosting providers in the Netherlands where customers can start working on the OpenStack cloud.

To get started with the Fuga cloud, just create a new account on the website.

Cyso/ Fuga.io: Deployment details

Implementation: Production
Industry: Managed hosting
Application: Public cloud
OpenStack release: Kilo
OpenStack distribution: Canonical 14.04 LTS
Amount of hosts: 60 nodes
Storage: Ceph
Hardware Platform: SSD storage Kingston

User story 2: Short time to market with a true ‘pay as you grow’ hosting services

Flexwebhosting delivers fast, affordable and reliable hosting services. OpenStack allows them to offer true ‘pay as you’ go hosting services beside their existing virtual private server hosting. In just a few weeks, Fairbanks and Canonical installed two OpenStack clouds in the Flexwebhosting data centers. The first is used directly for customers and is fully supported by Fairbanks and Canonical. The second environment is a test and acceptance environment for testing new developments and customer migrations. Once the service teams have gained all the necessary experience in this area, they can decide to take the production environment back into its own service. Through a unique customer portal, the team delivers its added value services by giving their customers the opportunity to directly create all the required infrastructures and to provide and create additional hosting services such as domain name hosting, certificates and connections.

Flexwebhosting: Deployment details

Implementation: Production & Testing
Industry: Hosting
Application: Public Cloud
Version OpenStack: Kilo
OpenStack Distribution: Canonical BootStack
Amount of hosts: 30
Storage: Ceph
Hardware Platform: Dell, Super Micro

User story 3: Shared hosting services without vendor lock-in

The Overheids DataCenter-Noord provides data center and hosting services to government institutions in northern Netherlands. It is one the remaining data centers in the [Dutch government’s plan to consolidate data centers](https://thestack.com/data-centre/2015/03/26/the-netherlands-opens-fourth-government-data-centre-in-consolidation-efforts/] to just four. ODC-Noord acquires floor space within a datacenter built by an external party. ODC-Noord has built an IT-infrastructure in this data center based on an OpenStack Cloud and Ceph Storage environment. As an independent expert in the field of OpenStack, Fairbanks has helped with the auditing of the chosen architecture and design.

The remarkable development is that recently ODC-Noord has decided to offer the participating governmental entities hosting services that are also based on the community versions. To build the necessary knowledge and experience and to contribute to the development of the community versions, ODC-Noord has composed a internal development team and sought cooperation with knowledge institutions in the North of the country. This will give the open source OpenStack and Ceph communities a major boost on the development side in the Netherlands.
Fairbanks is one of the parties providing ODC-N with up-to-date knowledge when their own experts can’t find a solution. ODC-Noord plans to expand the hosted environment exponentially while keeping administrative expenses more or less constant. And that’s what all customers are asking for!

ODC-North: Deployment details

Implementation: Production
Industry: Government
Application : Shared Cloud Infrastructure as a Service
Version OpenStack: Icehouse
OpenStack Distribution: RDO OpenStack
Amount of hosts: 37
Storage: Ceph
Hardware Platform: Super Micro

User story 4: Delivering a cloud to optimize client interactions

ActiveVideo, located at the Media Park in Hilversum, is a developer of a cloud TV solution. This is cloud-based software platform that allows service providers, content aggregators and CE manufacturers to virtualize Customer Premises Equipment (CPE) functions in the cloud. This is part of delivering next-generation user interface, online content and interactive advertising to millions of TV-related connected devices.

ActiveVideo: Deployment details