Ratiodata, a leading German IT service provider specializing in the cooperative financial services sector, offers a wide range of modern cloud services. The company is now embarking on a significant flagship project: converting its existing IT infrastructure from a virtual setup to Broadcom’s VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) private cloud platform, while maintaining continuous operations. Simultaneously, Ratiodata is consolidating its data centers from four locations to two, enhancing reliability. This complex project is progressing smoothly and is expected to be completed by the third quarter of 2025. Ratiodata has long trusted VMware technologies, using the same solutions for its own infrastructure as it offers to its customers.
At the start of the project, the IT system house operated two redundant data centers in Frankfurt and two redundant data centers in Münster. Large virtualization environments based on the long-established vSphere infrastructure were running at both data center locations. Redundancy was previously provided at the regional level: if a data center had failed, the redundant data center at the same location could have taken over. However, a major disaster affecting both data centers at the same location would not have been covered.
Requirements for future architecture
The future data center structure envisages only one data center per location. These data centers are located approximately 300 km apart and are operated in a geo-redundant manner via fiber optic lines. In addition, the data centers in Frankfurt were to be closed and a new data center was to be built in Karlsruhe at the parent company Atruvia AG.
The local separation was necessary to meet the Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) requirements for geo-redundancy and to achieve cost savings by using the parent company's data centers.
Conversion of the technology stack
The conversion should also enable an increase in network security. Here, Ratiodata decided to switch to VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF). The reason for this was to rely even more heavily on software-defined networking and micro-segmentation based on VMware's network virtualization technology to better protect applications against ransomware.
In addition, the transition to VCF should make container-based applications easy to implement. In this context, Ratiodata decided to use the vSphere Kubernetes Service and vSphere Supervisor Services integrated in VCF, allowing virtual machines, containers, and Kubernetes clusters to operate together. The VCF private cloud platform allows Ratiodata to implement a private AI architecture on which the company can apply artificial intelligence cost-effectively, flexibly and according to its own security requirements.
Increased security requirements and maximum data sovereignty
Another important requirement of the new data center infrastructure was to ensure full control over data and applications, as well as maximum flexibility via a private cloud platform .
Due to its customers in the highly regulated financial sector, Ratiodata has to meet strict requirements for data protection, data security and data sovereignty and must guarantee full control over all areas of the IT infrastructure. In view of this, switching to VMware Cloud Foundation was the only logical decision for us,’ explains Michael Heier, Head of IT at Ratiodata. ‘With VCF, we can offer our customers a cloud-like experience in our own data center.’
Easy deployment of additional customer instances
The VCF private cloud platform can also be used to create standardized, multi-client-capable customer environments that enable both rapid provision and flexible scaling. ‘Whatever requirements we face, with VCF we are well equipped for the future,’ emphasizes Martin Huschka, infrastructure expert at Ratiodata.
The final objective was therefore the complete implementation of VCF Automation and Operations in order to be able to access comprehensive automation, optimization and analysis tools that can fully automate standard tasks.
Overall, VMware Cloud Foundation, with its automation, advanced security features, dynamic network functions thanks to SDN and comprehensive cloud management, offers a significantly more flexible and easier-to-manage IT infrastructure environment.
Micro-segmentation increases security
In addition to VMware Cloud Foundation, Ratiodata also purchased Broadcom's VMware vDefend and vDefend Distributed Firewall products to provide zero trust micro-segmentation capabilities. These additional solutions limit lateral spread of threats with a software-defined and network topology-agnostic L7 firewall. They deliver context-based, granular enforcement at scale to protect all your application workloads and prevent ransomware from spreading to other application servers and the core infrastructure in the data center in the event of a successful attack.
Ratiodata's IT managers were provided with additional support from their Broadcom partner to maximize the benefits of micro-segmentation and software-defined networking technologies.
Reducing the hardware and carbon footprint across its data centers
Ratiodata's project aims to reduce its carbon footprint by migrating to the VCF platform. Initially, new hardware was purchased, but it represents only a fraction of the target data center size. Currently, workloads are being transferred from the existing vSphere platform to the new VCF environment. Older hardware will be dismantled and reused, while outdated servers will be phased out. This migration will increase server performance and density, allowing more virtual machines per server. Consequently, the total number of servers will decrease, reducing power consumption and costs by 25-30%, aligning with Ratiodata's green IT objectives. The final phase, starting late Q1/2025, will focus on developing new products for customers with high security and reliability needs.
Conclusion
Ratiodata's project lead Christian Böke is very positive about how the project has gone: ‘We have set out to further modernize and professionalize ourselves. To do this, we are relying on a flexible, scalable tech stack. Migration is not only a comprehensive project, but also serves as a showcase and lighthouse project. We have made major investments in infrastructure, building up expertise and licenses. The project is significantly larger than would currently be necessary. But we have embarked on this venture to make ourselves fit for the future. Because we designed and implemented this project together with comdivision, the leading VMware Professional Services Partner, it also strengthens our consulting services and builds trust for our customers in the cooperative financial world. We are convinced that the VCF private cloud platform will be the perfect basis for future projects and new customers.’