BaltCo, a part of Viciunai Group, chose the CloudServer cloud hosting from ActiveCloud by Softline to create a distributed corporate IT infrastructure that integrates the company’s offices located in four different countries into a single hub.
BaltCo LLC was established in 2003 by Viciunai Group, one of Europe’s largest manufacturers of fish products, to enter the market of Russia and the CIS countries. The group, which includes 47 companies, supplies its VIČI-branded products to consumers in more than 40 countries. BaltCo is currently the largest importer of surimi products in Russia and has a significant market share. As Viciunai Group expanded its operations, it opened offices in Belarus, Ukraine and Kazakhstan.
The growth of the organization and the opening of new offices necessitated the upgrade of the existing IT infrastructure, as the available servers had become obsolete. As a result, the company’s technical department was set a task to find a platform for hosting corporate data. The main requirements for the infrastructure included high fail safety, uninterrupted operation and the ability to quickly access resources from all of the company’s offices across the CIS. BaltCo’s IT specialists had a choice: to achieve resilience using local hardware-based clustering or to use cloud technologies with data duplication.
“When creating a cluster it is necessary to keep in mind the need to ensure the framework for the construction of an appropriate infrastructure: it is mandatory that we have backup of data storage, organize uninterrupted power supply, ensure two independent Internet channels, etc., let alone the need to provide significant amounts of money in the budget for the implementation of such a solution. It is possible to place the cluster on the data center platform, but anticipating the possibility of server failures and delays in equipment replacement by the data center, we had to give up on this option as well. Once it became clear that it was unfeasible to create a cluster on our own or in a data center based on dedicated machines, the decision was made to move the infrastructure to the cloud. The only thing left was to choose a reliable data center and provider,” says Dmitry Frolov, Technical Specialist at BaltCo.
The company chose cloud hosting from ActiveCloud by Softline (IaaS). BaltCo experts were perfectly satisfied with the level of technology, reliability, flexible approach to the provision of server capacity and the possibility of leasing software.
“The value of ActiveCloud as a provider for BaltCo lies in its balanced policy of selecting data centers and long-range geographical presence within the area of the company’s branch network. Due to its platforms in Russia, Belarus and Lithuania the matter of supporting information flows between the countries and migration of the server from one data center to another becomes a mere technicality. The scalability of resources and ability to manage the lease fee of the cloud depending on the load is also a significant advantage,” says Dmitry Frolov.
BaltCo’s IT department tested ActiveCloud’s platform and decided to lease server capacity at several data centers located in various countries (Russia and Lithuania). Currently, the company’s specialists are setting up a geographically distributed cloud infrastructure of the organization, transferring into the clouds the most critical applications (email service, databases, and corporate website).
“When we were originally faced with the issue of cloud technologies, we decided to approach the search for a provider with thoroughness, in order to compare and weigh everything in detail. As a result, the unambiguous decision was made to enter into an agreement with ActiveCloud based on the key criteria, and at the moment we are fully satisfied with the solution that we chose,” says Alexander Tarasinsky, Head of Development at BaltCo LLC.
“We are very pleased that such a big company as BaltCo has chosen our cloud solution. Recently we became one of Russia’s first providers to build clouds in Europe, which empowered our customers to not only place data on the European platform, but also create their own distributed business systems while using the capacity of our platforms in different countries,” says Igor Korman, Director of ActiveCloud (ActiveHost RU LLC).
