Delphix DaaS helps Fastweb accelerate time to market for products and services, slashing the time needed to provision an environment from over a week to a couple of hours. Using Delphix DaaS, Fastweb has also improved data quality by enabling development teams to find more bugs earlier in the development cycle. Simultaneously, Delphix DaaS has helped Fastweb reduce its storage costs by 80 per cent.
Delphix enables developers and testers to refresh or reset data on demand via self-service access, delivering fresh data daily instead of the previous monthly updates. As a result, Fastweb have seen data-driven errors nearly eliminated, integration testing has been transformed, and enabled multiple data sources (as many as 40) to be provisioned and then reset in sync from any point in time - all in a matter of minutes.
Delivering a quad-play offering (telephone, internet, TV and mobile) to over two million residential and business customers, Fastweb is continually innovating its packaged offerings. It also provides a range of value-added services to business customers such as hosting, cloud and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (Iaas). In 2013 Fastweb embarked on a modernisation programme to increase agility, optimise infrastructure and support DevOps and continuous delivery. The new programme demanded shorter development cycles, rapid access to data and flexible development environments.
Fastweb had limited resources, and with over 100 applications, 300 databases and complex integrations, was struggling to cope. “It used to take seven days days to provision an environment for a single application project, during which time developers were unable to work, and defects were creeping into live systems.” said Marco Guadagnini, operation infrastructure manager, Fastweb.
“With intense competition from global providers, we wanted to move to a culture of continuous innovation,” continued Guadagnini. “With Data-as-a-Service minor releases can now be turned around in days rather than weeks. Integrating testing is now on demand, which was unimaginable before. Delphix has enabled true continuous delivery making us more competitive, improved the quality of our services and helped drive business growth.
As a result of choosing Delphix to virtualise the data layer, Fastweb has also achieved significant capex savings - the budget that otherwise could have been spent on extra storage was reallocated for the implementation of the Delphix platform, avoiding costs for the 150 terabytes (TB) of production data and reducing the non-production data by 80 per cent, saving a grand total of 250TB of storage.
“Fastweb has seen how Delphix can help operations be far more agile in supporting development, and as a result the business is able to offer more products to their customers through the realisation of continuous delivery," said Iain Chidgey, vice president, international sales, Delphix.
