Telent

Telent enables digital transformation and hybrid cloud for use cases ranging from rail and traffic to public safety and defense

Specializing in the effective operation of critical digital infrastructure, Telent is at the heart of many of the UK’s and Ireland’s best-known brands. With a strong focus on the public sector, Telent plays a vital role in designing and delivering solutions and services for a variety of mission-critical customer areas, including public safety, transport, government, emergency services, and defense.

Telent’s industry expertise and accreditations make it the technology partner of choice for organizations at the forefront of the digital revolution, including Highways England, HM Coastguard, London Ambulance Service, Merseyside Fire and Rescue, Metropolitan Police, Network Rail, RNLI, Sky, Transport for London, Virgin Media and Vodafone.

The company’s stellar reputation and unwavering commitment to serving its customers leave no room for compromise when it comes to choosing technology solutions. So, when Telent decided to develop a cloud services platform to support its customers’ needs, only the best storage solution would do.

6 key design principles inform solution requirements

Because the platform provides services that support national critical infrastructure, it was important that every component excelled in its ability to meet Telent’s defined set of design principles, described as the “six S’s:”

• Scalability
• Security
• Speed
• Stability
• Simplicity
• Serviceability

Cost-effectiveness was, of course, an important consideration as well.

Strong partnerships, strong solution

Just as Telent’s public sector customers see the company as their trusted partner, Telent has its own trusted partners — one of them being HPE. It only made sense that HPE servers act as the basis for the design of its managed cloud services platform.

Leveraging the strong ties of yet another strategic partnership between HPE and Scality, Telent found that layering the Scality software-defined storage on top of HPE Apollo server hardware produced “a very compelling solution.”

Scality object storage is used in the Telent cloud platform in a number of ways:

• As a scale-out, cost-effective tier of storage supporting Telent’s digital asset management solution primarily developed around digital evidence management for UK police forces. Digital evidence uploaded by police officers is managed by an application providing intelligent search, scan, analysis, management and secure sharing of assets.

• As an S3-compliant, scale-out storage tier to support Telent’s backup-as-a-service (BaaS) offering, enabling automatic ‘aging out’ of data to a longer-term retention tier of storage

• As a scale-out, cost-effective object tier of storage to support any customer consuming IaaS resources

Telent’s customers benefit by having access to an object storage tier that’s secure, massively scalable and cost-efficient. With Scality RING providing resilience across multiple data centers and supporting a multi-tenant environment of cloud services, Telent is freed up to design and create new services to benefit customers.

A future-proof system with benefits that directly impact customers

When asked about the benefits of Scality RING, Telent’s solutions architect explains:

“RING being software-defined and, therefore, decoupled from the hardware gives us the flexibility to deploy it on server infrastructure that is right-sized for the solution. Its resilience is another major benefit. Our solutions are used to support national critical services, so retaining data for the long-term — lifetime retention in some cases — is essential. RING’s scalability is also key. As a service provider, we need to be able scale the solution in situ, while running, with no impact to services. Couple this with the data retention requirements, and petabyte scale becomes very important.”

He continues: “RING’s enhanced security and multi-tenant features fit very well in supporting Telent’s customers and services. The addition of eXtended Data Management (XDM) is of particular interest as it provides data management capabilities across clouds and multiple RINGs. Many of our customers have solutions that are edge-centric when it comes to data creation, so being able to provide data management and governance from edge to core with a single namespace is an interesting prospect.”