Cloud Phone Operator Nfon in Munich, Germany, Chooses LizadFS

NFON AG, a cloud telephone system operator, has selected LizadFS, Inc. for their multi data center distributed storage.

Headquartered in Munich, NFON is the only pan-European cloud PBX provider – counting more than 15,000 companies across 13 European countries as customers.

The cloud telephone system offers over 150 functions as well as an integration of solutions which results in high-quality communication.

Rather than being stored on-premises at its customers’ offices or data centers, the NFON cloud PBX operates in the cloud, in several external computing data centers that are reached via an encrypted internet connection. NFON promises a 24/7 service with enterprise-grade availability so that these businesses can be consistently available for their customers and business partners.

NFON required a distributed file system that would work across data center boundaries and met its HA requirements.

In a cloud environment, where information and workload are distributed across many nodes and even data centers, some information like voicemails and reports has to be available on a lot of nodes. The distribution of the files and changes to then has to be propagated near real-time, reliable, fault tolerant and mimic a local filesystem.

“After testing a few candidates we were convinced by the speed and especially the uraft component for HA” says Markus Stumpf, VP operations and infrastructure, NFON. “Another feature we were looking for was quick and easy integration in our existing toolsets, so we preferred a filesystem over other technologies like document stores.“

The setup provides geographical redundancy. Even in the case that one data center fails entirely all files are still available in the other datacenter, can be accessed, deleted or new ones can be created. When the other datacenter comes back, the changes are synchronized automatically. With the capability of LizardFS to be resized up (and down), it provides scalability for a growing business.

Stumpf concludes: “We were impressed by the stability and fault tolerance LizardFS provided in our tests. The cluster setup was quite easily integrated in our configuration management, too. Another cluster, for a different purpose, was set up within minutes.“