Products in this case study:
The Customer
Copan is a global leader in pre-analytics and medical devices that develops high-quality and cutting-edge biological sample collection products for infectious diseases, human genomics, environmental and forensic applications, along with high-end automated workflow solutions. The company is headquartered in Brescia, Italy, where it was founded more than 40 years ago. Today Copan has a global footprint with offices in Italy, the USA, China, Japan, Puerto Rico and Australia. Copan’s products, 40 years’ experience, leadership and innovation proved to be of global value when the Covid-19 pandemic dramatically increased the need for collection and transport processes for infectious disease testing. As a result, Copan’s solutions are leading to more and more reliable diagnoses and have dramatically improved healthcare professionals’ workflow while dealing with the effects of the pandemic. Download the full Copan case here.
Key Requirements
- Need for an IaaS partner to solve various challenges for the changing requirements of the growing company’s IT infrastructure
- Fast and reliable web hosting for the group’s various websites and media delivery system
- Secure, fast and flexible vCloud Private Cloud infrastructure to connect the company’s ERP system with Salesforce
Our Solution
- Leaseweb hosting, managed through private network with VPN channeling
- Leaseweb Private Cloud Premium for vCloud
- Leaseweb Global Low Latency Network.
The Challenge
Due to the challenges of the global pandemic, Copan as a company has been growing fast and the IT infrastructure needed to keep pace with that growth. As with every growing company, requirements can change quickly, and IT needs to offer the right solutions for business needs when they arise. The challenge was to find a partner that offers a wide range of flexible services for cloud, hosting, co-location, and dedicated servers, depending on different use cases. Copan’s first issue was its unreliable hosting services for its website and media delivery system with high latency, which resulted in a negative customer experience. On top of that, it needed a flexible and secure public cloud solution to connect its internal ERP system with Salesforce.
“We needed an IaaS partner that can deliver the flexible infrastructure and cloud solutions to set up our VMs exactly how we want them, which we cannot achieve with public cloud vendors alone. On top of this, we needed superior network connectivity without sharing it with other customers over the public internet. And we needed a partner that has the professional support to work with us to create tailored solutions for our changing requirements. Leaseweb ticked all three boxes and made it the top choice to tackle various challenges, ranging from web hosting to media delivery and running special applications in a fast and secure hybrid vCloud environment.”
- Matia Zanella, Senior Systems Administrator Manager at Copan
The Solution
To start with, Copan switched its hosting services to Leaseweb and immediately decreased the load times for its website from 10-15 seconds down to 0.5-1 second. As the previous web-hoster had only used one IP for all its customers, Copan’s website had not been available in China. This issue was also immediately solved with the move to Leaseweb’s hosting services. On top of the web hosting, Copan also moved its media delivery system, which is web-based, to Leaseweb. Both the media delivery and the website are based on the same vCloud infrastructure. With Leaseweb, these services are now not only globally available but the load times are also blazingly fast. To provide maximum reliability and performance, all servers were set up with high performance SSD storage in a scalable on-demand resource pool, operating on a high availability cluster environment. These new vCloud clusters at Leaseweb in Frankfurt are directly connected to Copan’s main datacenter in Brescia via a VPN site to site permanent channel.
This secure and fast setup through a VPN channel proved to be the starting point for the solution of Copan’s other challenge: the secure connection of its internal ERP system with Salesforce: “We did not want to expose our internal ERP-system over the public internet. Instead, we used the existing VPN channel to connect a virtual machine running Salesforce as a reverse proxy server. To achieve this, Leaseweb provided a second vCloud infrastructure, dedicated to Salesforce.”
The Outcome
- Decreased load times for Copan’s website from 10-15 seconds down to 0.5-1 second
- Immediate availability of the website in China
- Flexible IaaS solutions for various challenges and changing requirements, compared to rigid PaaS platforms
- Blazingly fast hosting for websites and media delivery system
- High-speed and secure private network, guaranteeing low latencies to manage vCloud Private Cloud
- High performance with SSD storage
- GDPR compliant
- Highly trained personal support team
The Future
With Leaseweb on board, Copan does not have to choose between the public cloud, like Azure, or an IaaS vendor. Instead, both of the platforms can co-exist within specific setups. By combining their strengths, Copan can create a solution that gives them the best of both worlds for every use case. As Copan is planning to open more sites globally, there are plenty more challenges ahead, including colocation setups, disaster recovery with geo-redundancy over several regions or a global cloud environment.