Nextcloud partner Omnis Systems Ltd recently did a case study on the OnApp private cloud solution used by UK based Ambiental Risk Analytics. The cloud is used for data analysis but also runs Nextcloud with Collabora Online integration to support the productivity of employees, partners and customers.

OnApp by Omnis-systems

Omnis Systems Ltd is a Value Added Distributor specialised in promoting a range of complementary enterprise grade and commercially backed Open Source and Linux based solutions. One solution they offer is the OnApp enterprise Cloud, enabling businesses to run a powerful private cloud solution.

OnApp is the Cloud you can own
and it costs less than renting one.

OnApp goes further than a single private cloud, supporting hybrid solutions and federating with service providers around the world. OnApp takes care of managing compute, storage and network resources for you and it also brings together remote resources to provide you with a truly scalable hyperconverged platform. Learn more about their offering here.

Some serious hardware to keep data under control

The cluster developed for Ambiental provides an OnApp private cloud running on Intel Data Center Blocks, four nodes with each 144 cores, 1TB ram and 6TB storage, used for analysis and post-processing. A evaluation was ran with 63 VMs, ready to scale to hundreds of thousands once more nodes were required and added, both local and remote.

Looking at the requirements, performance and control were key. Public Cloud services at scale tend to get expensive and being self-sufficient has benefits for customers who care about where their data is. But performance turned out to be an additional advantage: HPC often requires booking in advance (or paying for ready-to-go capacity) and being able to immediately start processing data on retrieval provided a real benefit. And having data in a single location compared to spread out in and over cloud data centers also increased throughput, in the end resulting in a 3x faster end-to-end process.

This is another story, like the recent Dropbox one, showing how the ‘public cloud’ business case should be calculated carefully.

You can download the full whitepaper detailing the case study here.

Read more https://nextcloud.com/blog/partner-casestudy-intel-onapp-is-the-cloud-your-organization-needs/