Napa Labs Experience
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About the company
Napa Labs has been the developer and vendor of software and hardware for network building and administering since 2012.
The company’s project portfolio includes more than 100 successfully operated software systems.
Napa Labs’ first product is Equila DPI traffic filtering and blocking complex. The system provides tools for network status monitoring and traffic accounting of various Internet protocols.
In 2024 a system for remote management of client inventory was released – OTIUM ACS. The software complex provides very flexible and scalable interaction with a large number of CPEs.
The company has more than 16 development teams. New products are also expected to be released in the near future, which indicates the dynamic development and expansion of the product portfolio.
Project background
Providing capacity to in-house departments for certain tasks, such as hosting services and applications, is a standard practice for large companies.
High demand for this service within Napa Labs required a quick response from the company – launching a new business process for issuing cloud virtual servers from scratch and as seamlessly as possible.
A stable, high availability, and most importantly, flexibly scalable and adaptive IT infrastructure is a necessity for implementation of such projects
Project objective
The customer needed to select a set of products that would provide internal clients with reliable and productive computing resources with high deployment speed and flexible configurations to solve work tasks efficiently.
The choice of solution: why ISPsystem
Having studies the market of infrastructure products, the customer opted for ISPsystem products:
Napa Labs team has already used ISPsystem products in other projects. VMmanager has fully satisfied business requirements for solving the proposed tasks in terms of server virtualization.
ISPsystem platforms provide:
- stable operation even under high load;
- flexible scalability to suit the company's needs;
- customization support via an open API;
- multi-functional tools that eliminate costly external solutions in favor of two or three platforms and supporting systems;
- regular updates and support by vendor technical team;
- functionality-to-cost balance.
The choice ISPsystem products is also driven by a commitment to ecosystem-based approach to software implementation: all products are fully intercompatible across multiple application scenarios.
All of this allows managing your internal infrastructure efficiently.
Project workflow
The project implementation took about a month and included several key stages: preparation of servers, installation of network cables, software upgrade and configuration on each node, and configuration of the network scope. In general, the process went smoothly, without any major obstacles, and everything could be deployed independently without any assistance from ISPsystem specialists.
Proper routing and network security was implemented for stable access to cloud resources. For server nodes, the company has launched high-speed communication channels with redundancy, which guarantees high availability of the network scope and high throughput. This is critical to ensure smooth operation of the cloud platform and minimize data transfer delays.
Distinctive features of products used in the project
Solving basic tasks through out-of-the-box integrations
To implement the project, the customer's team mostly used ISPsystem platform out-of-the-box features – their functionality allow them to fully address tasks of working with IT infrastructure.
For example, the built-in backup system in VMmanager plays one of the important roles in ensuring data security on a project. It allows creating snapshots of virtual machines. These snapshots are involved in promptly getting projects back up and running in case of any issues.
At the same time, the platform features a system for monitoring the state of virtual machines and nodes in clusters in the format of dashboards. Administrators immediately see vulnerabilities in the infrastructure and can take the necessary steps to prevent an incident.
In the BILLmanager platform, the customer uses the built-in resource-issuing module, which allows provisioning a pool of capacities to one account to independently create the required number of virtual machines.
Automation of engineer's routine operations
ISPsystem platforms are designed to make the work of system administrators as efficient as possible by automating processes and operations. For example, VMmanager prepares the virtual machine for issuing: that is, it can install the required operating system on it before provisioning to the customer.
Distributed switch – one of the platform's basic functions – allows for automatic configuration of network in cluster nodes using template. When a virtual machine is created, the engineer connect it to a switch directly from virtualization platform interface.
High availability
VMmanager with Ceph storage support provides powerful tools to ensure data security, scalability and high availability of virtual infrastructure.
The storages have virtually unlimited scalability, which allows the system to operate even in case of software or hardware failures: in case of a failure on one of the cluster nodes, all virtual machines are automatically redistributed to other nodes. This ensures minimal or no downtime.
Ability to customize platforms to meet individual business tasks
ISPsystem flagship products contain an open API, allowing Napa Labs to write their own integrations or implement their own functionality.
Takeaways and plans
To date, the customer has been successfully provisioning virtual machines to internal customers using ISPsystem ecosystem products. This allows for efficient resource management and stable infrastructure performance.
However, as Napa Labs is growing and the scope of its projects is increasing, so does the need for more sophisticated and flexible solutions. The plans for the near future is to strengthen the automation of processes on the project. The company intends to create a single point of entry for resource aggregation that will enable:
- Monitoring resource consumption of every customer.
- Prevent infrastructure overload.
- Support high availability and performance.
This step will be an important milestone in the company's development, as it will not only increase the efficiency of resource management, but also ensure scalability of solutions, which is especially important in the context of growing demand and increasing complexity of tasks. Napa Labs continues to strengthen its market position by offering innovative approaches and solutions that meet the needs of dynamic businesses.
Opinion
We would like to emphasize the professionalism of ISPsystem employees and high quality of services provided. The vendor's team was always available to answer questions, accommodate our requests and make adjustments during the product development process
We would like to thank ISPsystem for its excellent work and recommend it as a reliable and professional partner in IT infrastructure management.
Napa Labs Technical Project Manager