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Orange Business Services, the Orange branch dedicated to B2B services, is a leading global integrator of communications solutions for multinational corporations. With the world's largest, seamless network for voice and data, Orange Business Services reaches 220 countries and territories. In 2010, the business was at a turning point. Despite the growing demand for telecommunications services, increased competition and the commoditisation of bandwidth had brought revenue growth in the industry to a standstill.

"How do you fight this paradox?" asks Vivek Badrinath, Orange deputy CEO of Innovation, Technology, and Customer Experience. "You increase the value of what you deliver to your customers." Orange Business Services quickly reinvented itself, moving into cloud computing with its Flexible Computing cloud service.

Orange Business Services realised it had to move quickly to meet burgeoning customer demands and reinforce its position in the industry. Explains Philippe Laplane, SVP Orange Cloud for Business: "Storage is a key part of our cloud computing solutions, so the agility of our storage and data is critical to our success."

Orange Business Services chose NetApp storage and data management technologies to enhance the agility, security, scalability, efficiency, and nonstop operations of its offering and support its ambitious cloud revenue goal of 500 million euros by 2015. "The technology and partnership from NetApp have been key to our success in the cloud," says Laplane.

THE STORAGE CHALLENGE
"Fast time to market was important because our existing telecom customers were eager for laaS, and we wanted to be the company to serve them," explained Yann Degardin, Technical Project Lead, Orange Business Services. "To meet our aggressive launch schedule, we initially used the same third-party Fibre Channel storage area network (SAN) platform that we already used for our own business, in conjunction with Cisco Catalyst switches.

But the SAN platform hampered our flexibility, in two ways. First, the maximum LUN size with Fibre Channel is 16TB. Therefore, we had to aggregate LUNs for customers that wanted larger datastores, and aggregation can decrease virtual machine performance. Also, a customer that needed 80GB had to provision and pay for 200GB, the smallest unit. We believe that our customers should have the flexibility to provision any size datastore."

The other drawback of the previous storage solution was that expanding or contracting a customer's datastore required manual effort from the operations team, an unsustainable operational model. To increase capacity, OBS had to aggregate cells into a single datastore that was visible from VMware and from the customer portal. Scheduling and completing the work typically took two full days - not a scalable process. Degardin went on: "And to decrease capacity, we had to migrate customer data to a smaller datastore. We couldn't simply remove a LUN from the datastore because we would lose data."

A FLEXIBLE CLOUD ARCHITECTURE
OBS gained the flexibility that differentiates its cloud service by replacing the original cloud storage with the NetApp Unified Storage Architecture. Multiprotocol support in NetApp storage enables them to use the same storage architecture for primary and backup storage and for physical and virtual servers. This relieves the IT team from having to learn and manage multiple storage environments. In the company's data centres in France and Singapore, they deployed paired NetApp FAS6240 storage systems for production data and paired NetApp FAS3240 storage systems for backup. Support for Network File System (NFS) protocol in NetApp storage solved the problems they had previously had with the Fibre Channel SAN, making capacity management far more efficient.

PROVIDING TIERED SLAS
OBS is now able to offer tiered service levels for storage performance - Gold and Silver - using the same NetApp storage infrastructure. The technology behind tiered service levels is NetApp Flash Cache, which accelerates data access by caching recently read user data or NetApp metadata. Customers that request the gold service receive an SLA for 600 IOPS. Their data resides on SAS drives that are front-ended by Flash Cache. Customers that choose the silver service receive an SLA for 160 IOPS. With Flash Cache, Orange can meet this SLA using lower cost SATA drives, helping to keep service costs down.

"We think of Flash Cache as bridging the gap between our SLAs and actual disk performance," explains Degardin. "We use NetApp FlexShare to specify the relative priorities of volumes, allocating 80% of the Flash Cache capacity to gold-tier customers and the remaining 20% to silver-tier customers."

AT THE HEART OF THE CLOUD
With its Flexible Computing infrastructure-as-a-service solutions, Orange Business Services has redefined its business and its customer relationships. "Customers see us more and more as a single source for their IT and network needs," explains Thierry Bonhomme, CEO of Orange Business Services.

Orange Business Services can monitor the availability and performance of an IT system - from the end user's workspace through the network and back to the data centre - so its customers don't have to worry about a single link in the chain.

Today, NetApp R&D teams work alongside Orange Business Services R&D teams and its vendors to design, develop, and take to market new solutions for Orange Business Services' vast target market. This includes large enterprises in 220 countries and territories as well as small to medium businesses in its French domestic market.

"Our Flexible Computing service is built on technology from today's leading vendors, and NetApp solutions are the heart of our cloud offerings," reveals Bonhomme. "They really embraced our ambitious business model and allowed us to scale quickly."

With 35PB of NetApp storage and counting, Orange Business Services will continue to leverage the power of NetApp storage and data management technologies when it rolls out a new line of big data solutions. "Storage is even more important in big data," reveals Laplane. "Big data is all about storage, compute, and analytics, so we need a very strong storage partner. With NetApp we have found a solid partner that's incredibly easy to work with."

GROWING ORANGE
"In the current economic environment," says Bonhomme, "the ability to launch an innovative business fast without sinking in tons of capital is one of the big benefits of cloud computing. Leading corporations worldwide are already turning to Orange Business Services' Flexible Computing to achieve greater IT agility. We are really excited about the way that Flexible Computing is transforming business. We are bringing together a wealth of technology to create new customer experiences, products, and services that will unleash innovation."
More info: www.netapp.com