Kernel is the leading producer and exporter of sunflower oil in the world, which was founded in Ukraine. Kernel exports its products to more than 80 countries and produces 8% of sunflower oil in the world. The company headquarters are located in Kyiv.

Task

The Kernel company is constantly scaling its business, using the services of such well-known cloud operators as Microsoft and Oracle. For the operation of its IT infrastructure, Kernel chose a multi-cloud approach, because the data placement in the clouds of several operators guarantees maximum fault tolerance, the ability to freely choose and use the best innovative solutions.

Along with the growing risks of losing critical data and increasing demands on the reliability and availability of the IT infrastructure, Kernel considered building a fault-tolerant solution and insurance options. After analyzing the situation, we decided that we need to develop and implement DR solutions for critical business applications. When deciding between the gear and the cloud, they picked the second option. It is faster and cheaper, after all.

Solution

The GigaCloud cloud operator built a DR solution for the company, which allows you to constantly (up to 4 times a day) upload copies of information and computations to storage. This reduces the risk of infosystem data loss in the event of emergency and hacker attacks.

Kernel has a rather complex network architecture. In order to make it convenient to use the clouds of different providers, GigaCloud experts, together with the customer's technical specialists, correctly configured the network architecture and reduced human intervention.

Kernel uses fast SSD-disks for its replicas, which allows, in case of emergency with the main architecture, to quickly switch to the GigaCloud backup site, start running and continue working. Usually, customers store replicas on slow drives, unwilling to overpay for “idle” infrastructure. However, there is a risk that if you immediately switch to the backup site due to slow drives, the launch process will also be slow.

Results

Kernel managed to achieve maximum fault tolerance of their IT infrastructure. In addition, working in the cloud has given the company a number of advantages:

• flexibility and speed of scaling;
• optimization of costs for updating the technological base;
• more effective allocation of time and tasks of the IT department;
• the ability to use data anywhere in the world;
• security (if something happens to the devices or the server, the information is saved).

GigaCloud and Kernel specialists regularly update the assembled infrastructure concurrently.

“According to the 2021 strategy, we are working on rapid business scaling. To do this, we are constantly increasing server capacity and the volume of storage data. The construction of a new large data center would take almost six months, while with the use of cloud technologies we can increase the resource capacity in three days,” says Andriy Pishyi, Head of IT at Kernel.