Customer Success Story
DT reinvents as a Digital Platform enabler using Virtuozzo Hybrid Infrastructure
Tolga Dinçer
Since DT Technology Group launched, the company has successfully reinvented itself several times to remain a cutting-edge technology business.
The Turkey-based company first launched in 2006 as a systems integrator focused on information and communication technology (ICT) installations. Over time, DT identified a growing opportunity in telecommunications and ultimately established itself as a key player in Turkey’s telecom innovation boom—creating a strong carrier infrastructure, delivering 2G, 3G and subsequently 4G mobile access networks to thousands of sites nationwide.
As the use of 5G for digitalization ramped worldwide, DT found itself once again evolving into a new space. In 2018, DT emerged as a digital platform enabler, driving the comprehensive digital transformation of legacy physical environments for enterprises and small- to medium-sized businesses alike.
Defining the vision
“We wanted to help customers easily modernize legacy systems while creating digital platforms for millions of users, across any imaginable application scenario,” said Tolga Dinçer, CEO, DT Technology Group.
“To deliver on our vision, we needed a limitless, flexible infrastructure that matched the size and robustness of the hyperscaler providers, but without their complexity and cost-prohibitive practices. As well as one that would work within individual customer restraints and goals.”
DT’s digital platform strategy required the company to provide a range of fundamental resources including:
This portfolio would, in turn, require a virtualized infrastructure that could support all foreseen and unforeseen needs—from various cloud configurations, to pay-as-you-go storage, immediate workload distribution to Kubernetes clusters, and more. Lastly, that infrastructure would have to be backed by a strong technical support team – one willing to help DT fulfill its vision through true partnership and reliable management of the virtualization infrastructure itself.
The problem with the status quo
DT’s digital evolution started first with recruiting and training a team of software engineers, integrating their skillsets with its existing telco expertise. The company then turned to a combination of hyperscalers along with a proprietary virtualization infrastructure partner that it believed could meet its advanced cloud and digital solutions delivery goals… but quickly began encountering issues.
Flexibility was minimal, hardware restrictions existed, scalability was challenging and technical support was limited—a major issue given the complexity of the proprietary virtualization software. The hyperscalers presented similar challenges, along with vendor lock-in and increased (sometimes hidden) costs. Meanwhile, the heavy demand for robust digital platforms didn’t slow down.
Outside of DT, other challenges existed. The server chip shortage affected the procurement of new servers worldwide, leaving organizations with the inability to update legacy hardware or to create/expand privately-owned data centers. And, data sovereignty in Turkey as well as other nations became increasingly important.
Enter Virtuozzo
Logic dictated that combining the collective needs of all organizations—municipalities, businesses, universities, etc — and creating a local cloud infrastructure would prove beneficial to all parties.
A hyperconverged OpenStack infrastructure working across DT’s Public Cloud, Telco Edge Datacenter and on-premises data centers would allow DT to maximize all available resources to meet that collective need, while also delivering the flexibility required to offer advanced digital platform services.
Enter Virtuozzo. Virtuozzo Hybrid Infrastructure is a cost-effective, production-ready OpenStack cloud solution that offers:
A Digital Platform enabler to be reckoned with
Today, DT leverages all Virtuozzo has to offer—maximizing Virtuozzo Hybrid Infrastructure’s capabilities and features as well as Virtuozzo’s integrated tech support.
“A proprietary infrastructure is too hard, too costly to manage,” Tolga explains, “as are the resources from traditional hyperscalers. From the hardware limitations and tech support issues, to the inability to migrate digital development out of proprietary cloud environments— we just saw rapidly declining ROI everywhere we turned.”
“We wanted to create a simple reliable infrastructure. We needed an enterprise-grade, hyperconverged OpenStack solution with flexible management, scalability and digitalization capabilities. No one else but Virtuozzo could deliver.”
Advanced digital capabilities
With Virtuozzo Hybrid Infrastructure, DT manages an enterprise-ready Cloud platform for businesses worldwide. DT can also easily include the advanced digital capabilities that are essential for digital platform enablement, including:
Object Storage & Kubernetes containerization
To help enterprises embrace a local native cloud solution, DT understood that enterprises sought more value beyond traditional services, such as secure data storage, affordable cloud resources, and strong virtualization. The market demanded a more sophisticated infrastructure architecture with quick time-to-market and exceptional scalability. Which is where Microservices on Kubernetes with native access to S3 Object storage came in.
Through Kubernetes containerization, DT can quickly create architecture design, as well as transform and launch various custom cloud applications on behalf of customers without disrupting any other running services. This capability allows customers to also simultaneously leverage native S3 storage capabilities powered by Virtuozzo. DT helps businesses rapidly modernize through digital solutions regardless of legacy system architectures.
GPU Sharing and AI in cloud computing
DT’s digital solutions deliver on any end objective, including those that require fast, low-latency video delivery, as well as fast data analysis and output delivery through machine learning. Over DT’s cloud, enterprises can run desktop service needs over VDI cloud while accelerating performance needs with GPU sharing for desktop performance.
Enterprises can ultimately run AI in the same cloud with GPU, TPU and AI inference cards, and can seamlessly load data to the AI engine inside the DT Digital Platform, and can get analysis immediately with hyperscaling. If Enterprises want to develop native AI, Kubernetes, S3 storage, and GPU, TPU, AI inference card passthrough can also be leveraged—all powered by Virtuozzo Hybrid Infrastructure at the core.
The bottom line
Switching to Virtuozzo Hybrid Infrastructure has driven a dramatic 30% reduction in total cost of ownership for DT. The company also estimates saving customers as much as 3x the price on services versus equivalent purchases through hyperscalers. And, DT can now deploy required microservices architecture design for customers in just 48 hours.
“We view Virtuozzo as a mission critical partner that has helped accelerate our transition to becoming Turkey’s leading digital solutions enabler. Through Virtuozzo, we’re not only creating new revenue streams, but are proudly operating as a committed, innovative partner to the DevOps community,” Tolga concludes.
