23 By Mikhail Chizhikov, senior sales engineer, Scality Did you know Kazakhstan is the 9th largest country in the world and the largest country in the world without access to the ocean? Here’s another fun fact: The central Asian nation is also making major strides with its digital transformation efforts and has received international recognition for doing so. The United Nations e-government development index ranked it at 29th place globally and 6th in Asia, acknowledging the country’s successes in this area. The Kazakhstan government has made digitization a high priority to help accelerate the pace of economic development and improve citizens’ quality of life. Scality is proud to be playing a supporting role in this move toward technological modernization — one that has a very real impact on the lives of millions of everyday people. The mission: Improve access to public services for Kazakhstani citizens Eurasian Resources Group (ERG) is the only producer of high-grade aluminum in the nation and one of Eurasia’s biggest suppliers of aluminum and iron ore. The Kazakhstan government has a 40% stake in ERG, which works in over 15 countries, employs over 80,000 people, and is a leading diversified natural resources group. As a company partially owned by the government, it is dedicated to improving access to public services in the areas where it operates and has kicked off these efforts through the work of two social impact startups it operates called BTS Digital and Smart Cities. Because most Kazakhstanis own smartphones, ERG saw an opportunity to bring digital transformation to public services by making them smartphone-accessible. Smart Cities manages the data centers and IT infrastructures for all the fund’s startups, including BTS Digital. As part of these digital transformation efforts, ERG sought an alternative to Ceph, an open-source solution that offers software-defined storage with unified (object, block and file) storage, to reduce maintenance costs. As it sought to digitize Kazakhstan’s public services, it wanted to leverage an S3 protocol. The Smart Cities team built a cutting-edge hybrid-cloud architecture that could scale to accommodate BTS Digital’s growth and expansion. The digital initiative needed a sizable compute infrastructure, which included servers with software-defined storage installed on them. HPE and Scality to the rescue: Keeping data sovereign and accessible Sergey Korobitsin leads the server infrastructure, virtualization and cloud team at Smart Cities. To support their ambitious undertaking, his team built a modern hybrid cloud infrastructure that could scale with BTS Digital’s growth and expansion. They started with about 20 servers, but BTS Digital kept growing every year. What they needed was a large compute infrastructure, including compute servers, controller servers, and servers designated for running software-defined storage. HPE was selected as the hardware provider. As a long-time partner of HPE, we frequently work together on projects to ensure we’re delivering the best of the best to our joint customers. HPE Apollo 4200 storage-density optimized servers, coupled with Scality RING, provided BTS Digital/Smart Cities with a robust, easy-to-use solution that keeps data securely stored across a hybrid infrastructure. Currently, their HPE infrastructure supports two clouds. One is a private cloud for ERG’s ecosystem of startups and the other is a public cloud accessible to Kazakhstani customers. Scality RING and HPE have enabled ERG to achieve these hybrid-cloud goals and ensure they’re making the most out of their combined public cloud and on-premises S3 storage infrastructure. Scality RING helps IT teams and the organizations they serve to feel confident that their mission-critical data is kept safe, secure and easily accessible. Many alternative storage providers offered S3 compatibility that wouldn’t work for BTS Digital’s needs. The majority of them relied on Amazon Web Services (AWS) to house backups. However, since BTS’s security requirements prohibit storing anything in a public cloud, they needed a solution that could provide an S3 protocol on-site. Scality gave them exactly what they needed. The Scality solution The Scality solution consists of three single-site RINGs, with 500 TB of usable capacity each. These are used for backup for ERG’s OpenStack virtual machines. Scality products have been meticulously engineered to offer five distinct levels of unbreakable cyber resilience so that customers — including BTS Digital, which handles the personal information of millions of people — have the utmost security against present and potential threats: Immutability at the Amazon S3 API level Off-system key management, wire-level encryption and data-at-rest encryption Geographic distribution and replication remove the issue of having all the data in one place Distributed erasure coding renders data unintelligible to low-level attacks Intrinsically immutable object storage architecture safeguards data at the core storage layer For more details about Scality’s five levels of unbreakable cyber resilience, click here. Why Scality? Our solution beat out three other major storage providers, thanks to our proven track record and the combination of affordability, ease of use, and security we offer. We’ve been positioned as a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for eight years in a row. Our RING solutions are used by hundreds of leading global enterprises, government organizations, and financial institutions around the world. Scality can manage and protect massive amounts of unstructured data, both on-premises and in public clouds. We are a dependable partner to a wide range of government entities around the world, including defense and transportation departments, public libraries, police departments, research facilities, prisons and more. Scality offers big data management and storage solutions that can combine data from both older apps and cloud-native apps in order to support new data-driven services. The Smart Cities team, for the first time ever, used commercially available software to create on-prem object storage with native S3 API protocol. Scality RING, running on the HPE Apollo 4200 System (a member of the HPE Alletra 4000 family), now enables the team to easily store virtual machine backups in OpenStack and scale as necessary to accommodate upcoming workloads. DevOps engineers at BTS Digital are now able to accelerate development while effectively managing their expanding data volumes. Looking to the future Scality enables organizations to develop new projects using their existing Scality RING solution. The flexibility of the storage system means it can grow and change with an organization as it looks to new business directions and opportunities. For example, ERG uses RING as storage for backing up virtual machines, but has also started to leverage Scality’s experience in building private clouds. As the organization continues to build on the digital services they offer, working with Scality and HPE will enable unlimited growth and unbreakable cybersecurity — without headaches or hiccups. Storage for the needs of today and tomorrow ERG is improving citizens’ access to government services, and Scality and HPE helped to make this project a reality. Software-defined storage is essential for building scalable and efficient IT infrastructures, and that’s where we excel. Scality RING is backing up BTS Digital’s critical digital assets quickly, scalably, securely and affordably. To learn more about how ESG’s hybrid cloud is improving the lives of Kazakhstani citizens, download the full case study.
