Rossel: modernizing to deploy new projects

Solutions to suit every takeover

Having been active for more than 130 years in the press industry, the Rossel Group remains a family business. The core values of independence, proximity, belonging and respect have been part of its DNA since the launch of the newspaper Le Soir in 1887. However, the group is constantly evolving. “Rossel’s culture is based on entrepreneurship, adaptability and corporate responsibility. It is diversifying its activities with acquisitions: Rossel therefore needed solutions that would allow it to adapt easily,” explains Christophe Delabbe, Solution Sales & Presales Manager Datacenter & Hybrid Cloud at Proximus.

Specific customer requirements

The demands and drivers that guided the choice of the IT architecture include:

• A clear vision for the migration to a hybrid cloud environment.
• The possibility of introducing a microservice-oriented development environment.
• Optimizing datacenter resources through SaaS or even PaaS services
• Automated launching of new services, combined with workload management.
• Reuse of recently purchased existing infrastructure.

An open platform for future developments

What was the initial situation? The infrastructure had a completely on-premise orientation with two datacenters, one in France and one in Belgium, with virtually symmetrical topologies. “The Rossel Group was very happy with the existing Flexpod infrastructure and wanted to capitalize on its knowledge and state-of-the-art technologies such as CISCO UCS and VMware. We also wanted to integrate an open platform for future developments such as Hyper-V, KVM, Docker, Kubernetes...,” Delabbe explained.

Making operational management simpler

Thanks to a solution based on Cisco HyperFlex and Cisco Intersight, the Rossel Group is now seeing the daily operational management of its infrastructure made simpler. “Over 90% of workloads are virtualized. There are not many journalists who still come to the newsroom to file their texts,” said Delabbe as an example.

Hyper-convergence to address potential problems

The hyper-converged environment makes it easier to solve any problems that may come up. According to Delabbe, this setup makes it possible to manage all cloud services, both private and public. “The replication features built into the solution have also allowed Rossel Group to eliminate the complexity of its storage network. All this while maintaining its RPO (Recovery Point Objective) and RTO (Recovery Time Objective) requirements.

Much faster upgrades

Proximus’ integrated solution offers considerable scalability and a significantly faster implementation of upgrades. The platform’s transparency enables a clear view of the TCO for its architecture and the future investments to be made. “Rossel can deploy new projects quicker while benefiting from the latest technologies,” said Delabbe.

Data migration without affecting production

Data migration was a very difficult issue for this newspaper publisher. All stakeholders have worked together to minimize the impact on the production environment. “The Rossel Group wanted to continue to use for a while those parts of the old infrastructure that still meets certain needs and it is therefore a transition in continuity,” Delabbe underlines and describes this evolution as ‘efficient and flexible’.”