The customer that commissioned the project was the Russian division of an international chemical reagent manufacturer.
Due to the challenges of 2022, the customer's global office deciced to leave Russia, so it was important for the Russian division to create a fully independent IT infrastructure.
Meanwhile, the virtualization system, IS tools, backup system, operating systems, DBMS, ITSM and Microsoft products (SharePoint, Exchange, Outlook, Teams, OneDrive and others) used by the division's 450 employees were all licensed by the parent company. The division did not have any Active Directory domain of its own, the parent organization did not allow it to migrate data from the cloud, and the transfer of licenses was prohibited as well.
The customer decided to build an all-new infrastructure in the Russian public cloud, using services offered by Russian vendors and/or open-source software. To accomplish this, the company turned to ICL Services.
Key Challenges
- Build IT infrastructure from scratch.
- Develop a workplace in-frastructure.
Solution
Implemented our solution
- The project began in the fall of 2022. Since the customer had insufficient staff for building its new IT infrastructure all on its own, getting a contractor involved was vital.
ICL Services offered two possible solutions: migration of existing services to the cloud, with minimal changes, or complete import substitution, including the replacement of operating systems with Astra Linux, DBMS migration to PostgreSQL, etc.
Workstations
The customer was able to retain several Windows Server licenses and individual solutions from the company's Microsoft 365 subscription, but did not have a Microsoft SCCM license for managing its workstations.
For this purpose, the ICL Services team used its own tools, based on open-source solutions: Puppet Server, Foreman and Chocolatey. The customer also purchased 200 new laptops from ICL Techno, with Windows 10 preinstalled.
Infrastructure
The customer had strict performance requirements for business-critical systems, so ICL Services offered several options for Russian cloud services, and deployed test benches in trial mode for each of them.
The team built a new Active Directory domain and migrated the DBMS from the MS SQL Server to PostgreSQL, concurrently with replacing the MS Windows Server with Debian for 1C.
Additionally, in order to save on licenses, the following intrastructure elements were migrated to Linux Debian:
- CommuniGate Pro mail server;
- TrueConf video confer-encing server.
Backup and monitoring systems were replaced as well.
Results
- Infrastructure development and migration was com-pleted without any busi-ness downtime.
- With the processes im-plemented by ICL Ser-vices, the customer now has a fully autonomous, manageable, secure and relatively inexpensive in-frastructure.