A French cloud service provider, ForePaaS simplifies data management and analysis by providing Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering. Customers visit a web portal to select their data sources, customise a prebuilt template for their industry and choose the cloud where they’ll store and process their data.
“15 minutes later they’re gaining insights about their business and customers,” said, ForePaaS Marketing Director, Vincent Michel.
A major retailer uses ForePaaS to identify different types of customers by analysing hundreds of millions of sales receipts. A consumer goods company monitors reactions to its 10,000 digital marketing assets on social media. A European cinema group built a dashboard that shows real-time ticket sales by movie, theatre, time of day and more.
Revealing the insights hidden in Big Data can take a massive effort. Companies first need to buy and deploy servers and storage, develop sophisticated software and connect to sources as diverse as Oracle, SAP, Salesforce, Facebook and Twitter. “The challenge of Big Data analytics is not just the volume, but also the variety of sources and the speed at which they flow into the data centre,” said Paul Sinaï, CEO and CTO of ForePaaS.
Challenge: easier development, faster performance
ForePaaS launched its cloud service in April 2015. Right away, demand kept more than a dozen developers busy. To introduce new analytics applications for more industries, the company needed a more versatile development platform. “One customer displays millions of social media likes and tweets as they happen, while another has to analyse one terabyte in few seconds,” said Michel.
The platform had to be fast because ForePaaS uses microservices, highly specialised modules that communicate with each other to carry out a larger task. “Good performance with microservices requires a very fast platform,” said Sinaï.
Besides a new development platform, ForePaaS also needed an appliance for customers who preferred to store and process data in their own data centres instead of a public cloud.
The hybrid cloud option would appeal to banks, insurers and other businesses subject to data privacy regulations.
Solution: one platform for development and production
Then ForePaaS discovered Cisco® HyperFlex™ hyperconverged infrastructure, which combines compute, storage and networking in the same appliance. “In Cisco HyperFlex, we saw an extraordinary opportunity to standardise on one platform for development, test and production,” said Sinaï. “It simplifies development because it’s so easy to scale and deploy. We can test in the same conditions the software will run when deployed in public clouds.”
Cisco HyperFlex System appeals to companies that want to store and process data on premises. It’s compact and they can manage compute, storage and networking in one place.
ForePaaS began with three Cisco HyperFlex nodes providing more than 1.3 TB of memory and nearly 8 TB of storage — all in two rack units. Deployment took just one hour.
More data? More sources? No problem
Easy scaling gives developers more freedom to innovate and also gives them an experience similar to a public cloud. Say a developer team is building a new analytics app that requires 10 large virtual machines. Adding storage, compute, or both is as simple as connecting a new node. It’s ready to use in minutes. “We’re innovating faster since we switched to Cisco HyperFlex,” said Sinaï. “Developers can try something new, test it and quickly roll back to try something else. They no longer have to worry whether they have enough infrastructure.”
Faster performance and real-world testing
When the company developed and tested its analytics software on traditional servers with network-attached storage, test results didn’t necessarily reflect real-world performance in the cloud. “Now our test environment is similar or identical to the production environment, so we can make sure we meet our customers’ performance requirements,” Sinaï said. “Plus, Big Data analytics are faster on HyperFlex because data is stored very close to where it’s processed.”
Simple appliance for hybrid cloud
When customers prefer to keep their data behind their own firewalls, ForePaaS ships them a preconfigured Cisco HyperFlex System. They just plug it in and connect to the ForePaaS cloud and they’re ready to go. Growth is painless because only the first node needs a network connection.
“With HyperFlex, our developers are freer to innovate because we can add more storage or compute in minutes,” said Michel. “And using the same infrastructure for development, test and our hybrid cloud appliance keeps the business simple.”
