Learn how RailTel India partnered with Pinakastra Computing to build an enterprise-grade multi-region private cloud infrastructure, with the use of OpenStack.

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Since its inception in 2000, RailTel has been modernizing the train operations and network systems administration of Indian Railways. With its pan-India high-capacity fiber network, RailTel has enabled broadband telecom to all parts of the country. It has a proven IT infrastructure that has been integral to the smooth deployment of all RailTel projects.

Modernizing Computing Infrastructure

RailTel embarks on its cloud services journey to drive pan-India e-governance initiatives and offer managed services. RailTel Corporation of India Ltd. sought consultation, implementation & maintenance services from Pinakastra Computing Private Ltd. for setting up a private cloud Infrastructure across multiple datacenter regions for providing Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) to RailTel customers. Pinakastra completed enterprise-grade self-service cloud deployment across two sites (Secunderabad & Bangalore) as active-active primary and secondary regions.

56% Savings: Implementation of Openstack based Pinakastra Private Cloud solution results in 56% total cost savings compared to VMware over three years. Pinakastra Private Cloud saves 56% in software and administrative costs over three years compared to the VMware license spend alone. Hence, the total savings are actually twice the VMware software license costs due to a massive reduction in administrative expenses.

With all other competitive private cloud solutions (VMware, Nutanix, etc.), almost inevitably a team of IT staff is needed to deploy, manage, run and operate the cloud. Any company would need to provide training to its people to run its software and hardware infrastructure. IT teams have to constantly learn more complex technologies and spend a lot of time just keeping the lights on. That cost alone can go as high as $1M per year for a 20-server deployment assuming 2-3 cloud experts, making these a prohibitively expensive and time-consuming alternative to Pinakastra Cloud.

Pinakastra cloud has been designed at scale and deployed as enterprise-grade with Active-Active Primary and DR regions enabling RailTel to run a variety of workloads supporting a variety of use cases:

Use Case/Workloads Key Benefits
Application development (Test & Dev)
  • Fast and agile application development and testing
  • Reduced cost
  • DevOps enabled using self-service
  • Higher security and isolation using SDN
IT as a service
  • Provisioning of apps in minutes
  • Self-service for users
  • Improved resource efficiencies
  • Migration of existing apps
Big data analytics
  • Rapid provisioning of clusters
  • Elasticity and sharing of resources
R&D
  • Rapid deployment of new apps for researchers
  • Building of custom apps
  • Sharing with each other
Agile platform for VMs and containers
  • Unified platform for both VMs and containers
  • Open APIs for developers, controlled environment for IT admins
Cloud Security
  • Defense grade security (CIS Benchmarks)
  • Network Isolation (VLANs and DMZ for Customer networks)

CLOUD FOOTPRINT

  • Hypervisor
  • Compute (VM as a service)
  • Block storage
  • Unified storage service
  • Image management
  • Load balancer
  • Networking and security
  • Application templates
  • Identity, access control, multi-tenancy

ADVANCED FEATURES

  • Self Service Portal
  • Single Click – Apps Marketplace
  • Multi-Site Enabled
  • Automated Monitoring & Observability
  • Automated cloud migration
  • Multi-site replication
  • Disaster recovery (RPO & RTO)
  • Data Security & Privacy
  • High bandwidth OFC backbone
  • High availability
  • No single point of failure architecture
  • Defense grade security and hardening (CIS Benchmarks)

ABOUT RAILTEL CORPORATION OF INDIA

Founded in 2000, RailTel is a “Miniratna” enterprise of the Government of India. RailTel, a “Mini Ratna (Category-I)” Central Public Sector Enterprise is an ICT provider and one of the largest neutral telecom infrastructure providers in the country owning a Pan-India optic fiber network on an exclusive Right of Way (ROW) along Railway track.

ABOUT PINAKASTRA

Pinakastra is an organization committed to making cloud computing infrastructure more accessible to enterprises, academia & research organizations by helping them in IT infrastructure consolidation through the Pinakastra™ cloud platform.