CAS accelerates breakthroughs in science by modernizing its OpenStack cloud

How we helped

In 2020, CAS sought to take its private cloud to the next level, an initiative that has involved continuously upgrading its OpenStack Enterprise platform and keeping the company’s technological capabilities current.

"The technology has to be bulletproof. It must be top notch," said Chandler. "We partnered with Rackspace Technology as our managed service provider to raise the bar for our private cloud — including everything from resiliency, to reliability, to service robustness. We went through a full redesign to achieve modernization of our private cloud."

A key project was a minimal viable product (MVP) upgrade that moved CAS forward several OpenStack versions with zero downtime over a six-to-nine-month period. This required careful planning and execution, including temporarily cloning the Keystone authentication service to maintain uptime of the critical Swift object storage that CAS relies on to deliver content to its users.

The project timeframe, which Chandler described as "incredibly successful," helped raised the baseline of credibility for CAS offerings to new heights. "Versions usually complete about every 18 months,” he said. “But we've gone from version N to V, nine iterations, in less than four years.”

The MVP project was a high-stakes undertaking for CAS with little room for error. "We're not a huge corporation in terms of revenue, and so when a single product is being supported by Rackspace Technology with OpenStack, and you're going through an MVP, it's a big deal," said Chandler. "The transparency, the communication, the way we systematically went through the releases and got to the MVP, it was successful and hit on all cylinders."

Another major initiative driven by the Rackspace Technology team was converting the CAS networking topology to single-bond LACP, cutting the number of switch ports needed in half, allowing higher rack density and saving significantly on data center costs.

CAS was an early adopter of the innovative Rackspace Technology assigned engineer offering, called Rackspace Elastic Engineering, which provides a dedicated resource to work closely with a customer.

"The number one benefit is that the assigned engineer becomes a resource that fits within our culture, first and foremost, and is truly part of our team," said Chandler. "The continuity of the expertise is another big factor, because these are really complicated environments."

Rackspace Technology expertise has helped CAS optimize deployment and significantly reduce costs. One key aspect that differentiates the work that the Rackspace Technology team has done with CAS is its use of optimization techniques, such as huge pages and CPU pinning, for the majority of VMs within its OpenStack environment. This optimization ensures peak performance and efficiency for CAS applications, giving the company a competitive edge in its industry.