Customer

Cloudlit has partnered with a leading Netherlands-based IT consulting firm specializing in providing comprehensive data management and automation solutions across Europe. This collaboration focuses on leveraging the capabilities of the IBM Maximo suite to deliver innovative, efficient, and scalable solutions tailored to meet the diverse needs of their clients. With a deep expertise in the Maximo platform, the consulting firm supports organizations in optimizing their asset management processes, enhancing operational efficiency, and driving digital transformation through advanced data management and automation strategies.

Challenge

Infrastructure Scalability and Cost Management: : The client needs to meet specific infrastructure requirements, including provisioning control and worker nodes with the required CPU, RAM, and storage capacities on Azure. Ensuring that the infrastructure is both cost-effective and capable of supporting future growth.
RedHat OpenShift Cluster Provisioning: Setting up the RedHat OpenShift cluster on Azure involves configuring a variety of resources, including pull secrets and resource quotas, while ensuring the correct settings are applied to meet IBM Maximo's specific requirements.
Persistent Storage Configuration and Data Integrity: Ensuring persistent storage is correctly configured is a critical concern for the client, as improper storage setup could result in data loss or performance inefficiencies.
Security Protocols for Sensitive Data: With the IBM Maximo Application Suite handling sensitive operational data, ensuring robust security is paramount. The client must implement and enforce stringent security measures to safeguard against breaches or unauthorized access. This includes securing both the RedHat OpenShift cluster and the Maximo suite itself.

Solution

To address these challenges, Cloudlit team has implemented following strategies:

1. Infrastructure Automation

• The team leveraged infrastructure automation via Ansible tools to provision the Azure RedHat OpenShift cluster.
• This approach ensured that the cluster was set up quickly and consistently, with a minimum of manual intervention.

2. Automated Azure OpenShift Cluster Setup:

• Using automation, the team was able to provision a cluster that adhered to the required specifications of 3 control nodes and 3 worker nodes. This setup included 12 vCPUs, 48GB RAM, and 360GB of storage for the control nodes, and 228 vCPUs, 1298GB RAM, and no GPUs for the worker nodes.

3. Integration of IBM Licensing:

• : The deployment process incorporated automated workflows for securing a valid IBM license file and IBM Container Registry key (IBM Entitlement Key). This ensured smooth authentication and license verification during the setup of the IBM Maximo Application Suite.

4. Persistent Storage Configuration

• The configuration of persistent storage was carried out based on the official IBM Maximo Application Suite 9.0 system requirements. Detailed instructions were followed to ensure the storage was properly aligned with the needs of the application.

5. Security Measures

• The team implemented a full security protocol to secure the OpenShift cluster, including configuring firewalls, VPNs, and other security controls to prevent unauthorized access. The IBM Maximo platform was also secured by adhering to best practices in data encryption and user access management.

Results/Success

Efficient Resource Utilization – the automated infrastructure provisioning and configuration, the deployment process was streamlined, ensuring that resources were efficiently utilized.

Improved Time-to-Market – The automated setup and clear configuration guidelines ensured that the deployment process was completed in a fraction of the time it would have taken manually.

Cost Optimization – The precise configuration of infrastructure resources minimized waste and optimized costs. By using Azure and OpenShift's elastic scaling capabilities, the business was able to scale resources as needed

Security Assurance - With strong security measures in place (internal-loadbalancer, firewalls, SSL certificates ), the business was able to ensure that the OpenShift cluster and Maximo Application Suite were protected against external threats

Future Scalability - The foundation laid during this deployment enables the business to scale the IBM Maximo Application Suite as needed, adding more nodes or features like IoT or analytics when required.

Technologies and Tools

Technologies: Azure Cloud, Ansible, RedHat, OpenShift, IBM Maximo Suite, Cloud Storage, SQl , Container Registry