2022 summary

2022 in numbers

Despite the loss of Russian customers due to the war in Ukraine, WaveCom's turnover increased by 30% compared to 2021. We renewed the ISO 27001 information security certificate for the fourth year in a row. The technical team received a total of ~1300 hours of training and currently the collective has 10 VCP - VMware Certified Professional, 2 VCAP - VMware Certified Advanced Professional and VCIX - VMware Certified Implementation Expert certificates, which makes us one of the most certified VMware teams in Estonia. WaveCom's competitiveness on the labor market is also shown by its 5th place in the 2022 ranking of payers in the telecom sector.

Major hardware improvements:

All VMware Cloud and web hosting services now reside on the HPE Synergy platform. HPE Synergy brings next-generation computing power, multiple storage options, and future-proof networking under one integrated management platform to provide even greater reliability for business and time-critical services. With software-based intelligence, HPE Synergy uses automation to reduce the complexity and time spent on day-to-day operations, thereby increasing productivity and reducing costs. With the transition to newer technology, high availability, efficiency in management, and the use of electricity and cooling have improved significantly.

In January 2022, the previous SAS SSD storages were replaced by the fourth generation PCIe NVMe storages. We adopted NVMe technology to take better advantage of microsecond latency, which allows us to provide even better latency for business and time-critical services. Testing of the new datastores showed a short-term fast read of 8000 MB/s and a sustained steady speed of 4000 MB/s. The capacity of the data storage IOPS is from 500,000, depending on the capacity of the disks.

Investments made to deploy state-of-the-art Cisco ASR 9902 routers to upgrade network services to 100GE speeds. A top-of-the-line Cisco router offers value primarily in terms of data traffic speed and security on the network, which is multiple times that of lower-end series. The ASR 9902 has data routing rates of up to 1.6 terabytes per second. The router has two Route processors, i.e. if one fails, the other takes over. Network ports are also duplicated. In total, one router has 8X40/100 and additionally 25/10 GE ports. Of course, power supplies and cooling are also included in the duplication.

Updates to the VMware Cloud platform, which has become our core service:

VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid high-performance clusters as a service with network automation based on NSX-T and fast provisioning of Kubernetes apps through App Launchpad. Tanzu allows workloads and infrastructure located on a micro-architecture to be easily installed and managed in a significantly more cost-effective manner than with native Kubernetes. With Tanzu, you can plan, build, manage and interconnect cloud-based container applications in public, private or hybrid cloud environments. The solution is modular, scalable and fast. Developers and users do not need to know the administrative tasks of Kubernetes clusters, but can focus on applications and content.

Cloud Director latest version 10.4.1 with enhanced functionality. Transparent load balancers have been introduced to eliminate the differences in the management of different generations of NSX-V and NSX-T network virtualization platforms. Through the wizard, vApps can be created from a template. Virtual machines based on UEFI Secure Boot (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) with additional security and functionality, which replaced the BIOS firmware. Auto scaling allows you to automatically increase and decrease the number of virtual machines in the virtual data center according to the change in traffic volume. Tanzu Kubernetes support and more.

Cloud Director Availability latest version 4.5 with enhanced functionality. Replication settings can now be pre-defined, speeding up the actual time of replications. Replication across different virtual data centers has become easier to configure with the addition of Virtual Data Center Group functionality. More than one RPO rule can be specified for process recovery at a time. A maximum of five different RPO parameters can be used when building a single recovery process, and the smallest RPO step is 1 minute. You can prioritize and order the replication execution settings of virtual machines and vApps and much more.

App Launchpad 2.1.2 enables rapid deployment of VMware Cloud Marketplace apps for customers. App Launchpad is aimed at consumers of cloud services, especially developers who focus less on the complexities of the cloud and more on applications. In App Launchpad, developers can launch applications in just a few seconds. All well-known applications such as Lamp, Ngingx, Tomcat, Node.js, Grafana, Jenkins, RabbitMQ, Cassandra, GitHub, various SQL servers, etc. In addition, many other developer tools in the form of various CMS, CRM and e-shops.

NSX-T 3.2 Network Virtualization and Security Platform. Through Cloud Dircetor, customers can manage their cloud services and also use all the functionalities offered by NSX. The client can create routed or isolated networks and define vApp subnets and access points (gateways), which are horizontally protected by a distributed firewall. Edge or vApp gateway includes firewall, NAT(SNAT, DNAT), IPSEC, L2 VPN, load balancer and much more. The new NSX-T solution creates the ability to use Routed and Isolated networks across cloud service sites. This allows one virtualized network (both routed and isolated) to be used in several different physical data centers, thus ensuring higher availability of services and applications.

Renewal of the VEEAM backup platform, with which WaveCom is now also a service provider with VEEAM SILVER PARTNER status. All customer backups have been transferred to separate physical servers with 40 Gbit/s connection, where faster and larger SSD storages are used. In addition, the ability to make secondary copies. All of the above means an even better level of backup availability speed.

Updates in the web hosting service:

PHP X-Ray monitoring. The working principle of PHP X-Ray is web page speed monitoring as well as slow code detection. The PHP X-Ray website report provides an overview of the most time-consuming PHP functions, database queries, generated HTTP requests, as well as WordPress plugins. Based on this information, conclusions can be drawn about the reasons why the page opens slowly.

AccelerateWP optimization to speed up website usability. The working principle of AccelerateWP is to provide relevant optimizations for fast page operation and recommendations in cooperation with the PHP X-Ray solution. AccelerateWP can only be installed on slow websites. If it is a fast website, then cPanel does not offer the option of installing the AccelerateWP module in its environment. This module buffers the most visited and slowest pages to present them to clients with lower performance and effort. Using the buffer system, it is possible to bring the apparent speed of the web page to tens of milliseconds. Perfect for a website where most of the content is static and doesn't change much.

WordPress Toolkit management interface. WordPress Toolkit is the next level of managing your WordPress websites through cPanel, a feature-rich management interface that allows anyone to install, configure and manage WordPress websites. WordPress Toolkit Deluxe with tools like Cloning and Smart Updates is now included in cPanel.

Imunify360 database scanner. Now the Malware Database Scanner is integrated into the existing Malware Scanner and offers a solution to fix complex database infections.

We also look to the year 2023, where we plan to introduce next-generation solutions in the cloud service:

Q1

• High-performance S3 service closely connected to VMware cloud service (S3 browser, Tanzu Kubernetes support, teplite and ISO file directories, encryptions).
• High-performance SQL and MQ services integrated with the VMware cloud service - VMware Data services
• DDOS and other cyber attack protection for all services.
• 100GE and 40GE new external connections to new routers. The total planned capacity is 380GB.
• NSX 4.x Network Virtualization and Security Platform.

Q2-3

• ISO 27017 standard for cloud services security.
• vSphere 8.x