At the end of June, Belnet has completed the reinforcement of its infrastructure to greatly improve the availability and resilience of its services and applications. This renewal, involving the use of a third data centre, offers new prospects for the development of current and future services.
After a year of collaboration, our Services and Networks teams have just completed a vast project to renew Belnet's services infrastructure, involving the use of a third data centre. This project was completely transparent to the customer and will significantly improve the availability and resilience of many of Belnet's services.
A 3rd data centre for greater availability of our services
Our infrastructure, which uses a global Ceph storage system, was previously based on two data centres. This storage system is used both for our Cloud Storage service and for the servers that provide other Belnet services. Since the resilience of Ceph is much better with 3 data centres, strengthening the infrastructure was a no-brainer.
To achieve this, significant investments have been made in order to use the latest technologies in the field of "multi-data centre" traffic, in particular. This results in a considerable increase in the availability, performance and efficiency of all services that run on virtual machines such as Cloud Storage, DMPonline and BAMS.
Greater redundancy
Our Virtual Machine (VM) clusters and high-availability mechanisms are now duplicated across the 3 data centres. This very significantly increases the redundancy. For example, if one of the data centres goes down, it will have no impact on service delivery.
More transparent updates
Another benefit is to minimise the impact of updates to different services. These updates are more transparent and smoothly performed.
A solid base that opens up new prospects
By laying new foundations, this project opens up great prospects for the development of new high value-added services. In particular, co-creation projects using, for example, hosting services as is the case with the ULB podcast service.
"We have laid the foundations to enable us to go further in terms of availability" (Philippe Van Hecke - Belnet Services & Security Team)
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