GDS PRODUCTION AND STAGING ENVIRONMENT IS NOW LIVE ON THE CARRENZA CLOUD

Carrenza has recently proudly announced to provide the bulk of hosting for the Government Digital Service (GDS) for the production and staging environments of GOV.UK to live on its cloud infrastructure.

The Government Digital Service (GDS) is the leading digital transformation of government, aiming to build public digital services by default simpler, clearer and faster to use. GOV.UK which is a product of GDS received in 2013 the reputed “Design of the year” award.

Carrenza was initially found by GDS through the G-Cloud III framework and an aggressive bidding process. Carrenza is the cloud service provider that supports businesses to run more efficiently with both Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and Platform as a service (PaaS) capabilities. Business Cloud News revealed that Carrenza rents capacity in Slough and London from data centre operators Equinix and Level 3.

Carrenza was offered to provide the infrastructure at the beginning for GOV.UK’s preview operation in 2013. However, Andrew Mellish, Carrenza’s Head of Public Sector Services claims: “Once we opened our second UK data centre and achieved official security accreditation, GDS moved the majority of GOV.UK’s ‘staging’ and ‘production’ systems to the Carrenza Cloud.” It is proved to be not a lie when GOV.UK receives 2 billion visits after giving the official accreditation and moving the majority of its “staging and production systems” to the Carrenza Cloud.

It is said that Carrenza runs the IaaS and PaaS offerings on a Vmware-based cloud built on HP servers and HP 3PAR SAN storage. With this, a number of operating systems, application and database technologies including “pretty much anything that runs on X86 architecture” will receive the most considerably comprehensive reinforcement.

Matt McGrory, Carrenza’s Managing Director, explains: “The belief that technology should make government services better lies at the heart of what Carrenza does and our customers engage with us because of the simple and effective way we deliver our services.”

The reason why GOV.UK chose Carrenza to be its cloud supplier is the in-house developed custom software at GDS. The software is considered to be crucial for source cloud hosting and support for the mainstay website.

Andrew Mellish claimed that if any cloud service providers want to win government contracts, it is necessary for them to focus on interacting with them. “Our team understands what GDS is trying to achieve and how best to deliver the technologies they are using,” added Mellish, “when someone from GDS calls one of our engineers, they know they are speaking to someone who gets it and will work with them as efficiently as possible.”

Cooperating with GOV.UK, Carrenza offered the right blend of services.

- Reliability and Availability: Carrenza provides the infrastructure with capability of approach, flexibility and expandability, meaning that it can rapidly respond to the highest demanding and most urgent requirements.

- Responsive technical support: With support provided by GDS team 24 hours a day and 7 days per week, Carrenza is able to handle with calls in 15 minutes.

- Security and Compliance: Carrenza is also confident in its solid security and compliance program which meet the demands of Government official accreditation. It is feasible for it to supply particular security solutions to meet the needs of customers corresponding to its PGA official and PCI-DSS accreditations.

- Open source technology: Carrenza is committed to using the best open source technology available.