by Thomas Tikwinski
SEAL Systems has been working on solutions for the cloud for some time now. Especially with a security-relevant and highly available service like corporate output management, aspects like data privacy, fault tolerance, scalability, and updatability play an important role. We especially have to find out how our software behaves in exceptional situations:
In our experience, such cases can be tested neither on virtual machines nor in large cloud data centers under realistic conditions.
We have therefore decided to establish our own cloud testbed that can also serve as a mobile demonstrator for our solutions; a data center you can pack up and take with you. The goal was to get as close as possible to a realistic operations scenario with limited resources, meaning:
For a technical base we have decided on a Raspberry Pi 3B. For a moderate price, it offers us not only good performance. It’s also very widely used, so we have a vast community we can fall back on. A design-compatible, Intel-based UP-Board is used for the more power-hungry components. ARM/Intel Multiarch Docker containers guarantee platform independence. Seven nodes are used to form each data center, and we have built two of these data centers and connected them over Edge Gateways. A chic acrylic glass case gives it just the right “data center” look.
We have made the building plans and instructions for our mini data center available as open-source content on GitHub.
Follow us on Twitter at @SealSystemsAG and #PiCloud to follow the project live!
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Thomas Tikwinski
Thomas Tikwinski is head of development in our Corporate Output Management Systems division. With 30 years’ experience in software engineering, he looks to technically solid, long-term viable solutions which can be used flexibly in diverse scenarios. He likes to spend his leisure time sailing or getting in some archery practice.
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