Red Hat open source solutions at the center of KazTransCom’s new cloud services in Kazakhstan.

Kazakhstan is a big country. In fact, it is the world's ninth largest, with more than 1 million square miles. It has a healthy economy, and its population is growing and becoming more educated and more tech-savvy. Internet users in the country have nearly doubled since 2010, and there's a competitive telecom industry. It's with this backdrop that KazTransCom, one of the largest telecommunications operators in Kazakhstan, went about modernizing its telco platform with open source solutions from Red Hat so it could offer new cloud services for business customers.

To build its infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offerings, the service provider deployed Red Hat OpenStack Platform and Red Hat Ceph Storage on Cisco server hardware. The telco wants to position itself as an innovator and cut the time it takes to deliver new services so it can beat out competitors and increase revenue.

In this Red Hat case study, Maxim Popov, head of research and development at KazTransCom, said the service provider evaluated several competitive solutions from other vendors. But Red Hat's enterprise-ready, open source technology – designed for flexibility – appealed to KazTransCom.

The KazTransCom network infrastructure stretches thousands of miles, so the service provider also needed reliability and scalability, something Red Hat's network functions virtualization (NFV) platform is designed for. Two other factors: Red Hat's close partnership with Cisco, and the fact that its software integrates with the existing Cisco hardware KazTransCom uses. "The design for the Red Hat solution was validated by Cisco, meaning we could build the platform with minimal risk," said Popov, adding that the integrated Red Hat and Cisco solution is very reliable.

KazTransCom is now able to deliver cloud services for business customers such as virtual machines (VMs) and backup-as-a-service (BaaS), and also to provide e-learning services, including content filtering systems for schools and public Wi-Fi services. The company says it plans to deploy the solution at more of its data centers and offer new services based on the Red Hat solution, including video surveillance and security solutions to prevent distributed denial of service (DDoS). There's a lot more to the story, so do check out the case study. And let us know what you think in the comments section below.