Case studyPublic sector · Education — Romania

EDULIB

A national platform of open educational resources — a virtual library for Romania’s schools — delivered on two identical, self-contained data centres built for high availability and public-scale access.

ClientMinistry of National Education

RoleSolution architecture & delivery

Sites2 containerized data centres

PlatformF5 · Palo Alto · Cisco UCS · DellEMC

StatusDelivered

EDULIB — Open education for every student: the national open educational resources platform for free access to quality content for all students and teachers in Romania. A student works on a laptop in a sunlit school library.

01The challenge

A public library for the whole country,
that can’t go down.

Open educational resources for every school mean a platform that stays fast and available under national load, resists attack, and keeps serving even if a whole site is lost. And it had to be delivered as a turnkey estate, not assembled on someone else’s floor.

The answer was two identical data centres — each a self-contained, climate-hardened container of four racks — running active-active, so the library survives the loss of an entire site.

P1 Two identical sites Physically and logically identical data centres, active-active, each able to carry the service alone.

P2 Turnkey & hardened Each site a four-rack container with its own power and cooling, built to run in extreme conditions.

P3 Balanced for scale Global and local load balancing across and within sites for performance under public load.

P4 Layered by function Five logical zones — interconnect, front-end, security, back-end, management — each with a clear job.

02At a glance

Two mirrored data centres,
one library.

identical, active-active data centres

racks per containerized site

functional zones per site

N+N

redundancy, end to end

03The architecture

Five zones, mirrored across both sites

The model below is the reference architecture, not the actual implementation. Each data centre carries the same five zones; traffic enters through the interconnect, is balanced and inspected at the front-end and security zones, and served from a converged compute-and-storage back-end.

ZONE 01

External interconnect carrier & Internet edge

Cisco ASR

BGP peering to RoEduNet and other ISPs, redundant per site.

Dynamic routing

Site-level redundancy and failover across both data centres.

ZONE 02

Front-end balancing & availability

F5 BIG-IP LTM

Application delivery controllers in an HA pair.

F5 BIG-IP DNS

Global server load balancing (GSLB) across sites.

Cisco Nexus

Layer-2 spine, virtual port-channel.

ZONE 03

Security perimeter & policy

Palo Alto NGFW

Next-generation firewall between front-end and back-end.

ZONE 04

Back-end converged compute & storage

Cisco UCS · HyperFlex

Fabric Interconnect, blade chassis and hyper-converged nodes.

DellEMC Unity

All-flash primary storage.

DellEMC Data Protection

Integrated data protection & backup.

Cisco MDS

Fibre Channel SAN fabric.

ZONE 05

VPN & management operations plane

Cisco Firepower

Management-zone firewall & VPN.

Cisco Catalyst

Management switching.

Cisco UCS

Management & services host.

04How a request is served

From a name to the nearest healthy site

Resolve The client asks the F5 GSLB to resolve the service name; it returns the public IP of the best site by live traffic and health.

Balance The client reaches the F5 LTM cluster on that public IP, which distributes the request across healthy back-end nodes.

Inspect Traffic crosses the Palo Alto security zone before it ever reaches an application.

Serve The converged UCS / HyperFlex back-end serves the content, backed by all-flash storage replicated for protection.

05Confidentiality note

We do not disclose specific addressing, locations, or the actual internal configuration of the project.

The figures and the architecture on this page describe the reference model and the publicly communicable scale of the engagement.

06Next step

Standing up a resilient public platform?

We designed and delivered a turnkey, dual-site platform for a national education service — F5, Palo Alto, Cisco and DellEMC, mirrored end to end. If you are building infrastructure that has to stay up, we can help.

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