The Challenge
To provide a managed environment for sharing files, contacts and calendars between multiple users and devices, meeting the criteria of:
- Secure
- Available from any location on any device
- Selectively share resources with coworkers or out-of-network customers
- Cost effective
- Cross platform with no vendor lock-in
- Transparent and easy to use
The Solution
Razyr rCloud is a multi-tenant, unified back end powered by OwnCloud 8 and Cloud-A IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service). rCloud users are able to meet their resource sharing needs for files, contacts and calendars without giving up control of their critical personal or business data to a cloud that’s “out there somewhere”.
Based on the success of rCloud and demand from customers who wanted private services, Razyr started rolling out managed, dedicated OwnCloud8 instances which could be readily scaled on demand.
The Architecture
Above all, rCloud needed to be secure. Credentials and in-flight data would be secured via SSL, making rCloud as safe to use from public WIFI or mobile devices as from your own office or home. Users could optionally encrypt stored files while at rest, making rCloud the perfect environment for both business and personal data sharing. Given that rCloud would be a managed service, all updates and security patches would be applied by Razyr Support so the environment was always up to date and monitored.
rCloud would be completely extensible through Cloud-A Compute so increased demands on CPU and memory could be easily accommodated down the road.
By leveraging Cloud-A Bulk Storage, rCloud’s file sharing would have triple redundancy, could scale infinitely on-demand and boast 99.99% uptime.
Given that rCloud would be fairly intensive so far as network I/O, Cloud-A had more than enough high performance and unmetered bandwidth to handle the load.
The Result
Razyr Networks’ Chief Technologist, Bruce MacKay made the decision to deploy rCloud at Cloud-A.
“Back in June 2014 we were looking for a home for rCloud. Cloud-A met all of our requirements for Canadian data residency, scalability, performance, uptime and security. What we weren’t expecting was the power of the OpenStack API combined with the innovation that Cloud-A support engineers have brought to the mix. Using a private virtual network within the data centre, our file sharing, database and LDAP engines all communicate securely and at blazing speeds, seamlessly integrating our email customers with the new rCloud. We not only launched rCloud, but we moved all of our computing services and our customers to Cloud-A.”
Building on the success of rCloud, MacKay described the experience of deploying dedicated OwnCloud instances for customers with specific needs.
“Using the convenience of Cloud-A’s dashboard combined with the power of the OpenStack API, spinning up secure, custom OwnCloud instances for specific customers is now a breeze. With Swift object storage on the back end, our customers have affordable yet infinitely scalable repositories for their MS Office documents, multimedia and archived data.”
So how is it all working?
“We have customers who have over 3,000 contacts on their phone, hundreds of appointments and thousands of files. Whether they are in the office or on the road, these customers know their data is secure, but available when and where they need it. rCloud powered by Cloud-A infrastructure and supported by Razyr handles everything transparently. It all just works!”
Get Started with rCloud!
