CADENAS

A worldwide software offering for Strategic Parts Management and Electronic CAD Product Catalogues

The design of machines involves incorporating a large number of components that have to be selected from an immense number of products from different manufacturers. Finding suitable components, requesting CAD data or specific configurations from manufacturers and managing enquiries are time-consuming tasks within this process, and can become an obstacle to the development of innovative products.

The Augsburg-based company CADENAS specialises in software that simplifies the work of design engineers by providing innovative solutions for the provision of CAD models. As one of the leading software producers in the areas of "Strategic Parts Management" and "Electronic CAD Product Catalogues", the company helps manufacturers in the creation, design and marketing of their product catalogues. These make it easier for engineers, designers, architects and planners to quickly find all the information they need about technical products in their everyday work. For component manufacturers, this provides a clear competitive advantage.

CADENAS provides their users online with more than 3,500 digital product catalogues from renowned manufacturers of technical components. Additional online services such as the search engine 3DfindIT.com and the download portal PARTcommunity.com complete the offer. Through the individual product catalogues of the component manufacturers, 3D CAD models can be configured as digital twins and downloaded for construction from all over the world and around the clock. For this purpose, a CAD model based on the user’s desired configuration is generated on the software manufacturer’s servers and can then be used in approximately 150 native and neutral CAD formats. The comprehensive configurability of the different product variants in various formats results in millions of different 3D CAD datasets which are continuously available for download.

In 2020 alone, CADENAS recorded 666 million downloads of such 3D CAD datasets. CADENAS’ online services are used by engineers and planners from over 120 countries.

An easily scalable infrastructure with high data protection requirements

CADENAS is dependent on the uninterrupted high availability of their worldwide services in order to serve customers and their buyers as a link between design and suppliers. Initially, the company operated their own servers in their own data centre to ensure this level of availability. With the focus on better global coverage of customer services, the classic housing model was subsequently expanded. The hardware was funded by CADENAS themselves – including VMware ESXi servers as well as storage and firewall/gateway components.

A disadvantage of this very rigid infrastructure approach quickly became apparent: the poor feasibility of scaling options. And even if they were possible to install, implementation usually took a long time. Every time the infrastructure was to be extended or defective components had to be replaced, team members had to be on site. Additionally, the personal responsibility for the hardware not only required a very high initial investment when setting up the infrastructure, but also made performance optimisations more difficult, as these were of course carried out in-house and thus required lengthy organisational preparation and a significant amount of time.

Performance bottlenecks during peak access times are particularly frustrating for the company as well as for their customers and their respective clients. If many users simultaneously access and download the CAD data, capacity needs to be expanded quickly. However, if these increased capacities turn out to be permanent, this results in immense additional costs, which rarely pays off in the long term. For the switch to a new infrastructure provider, it was important to the software manufacturer to be able to keep building on their existing expertise in VMware and virtualisation and thus generate synergies in operations and avoid having to start from scratch. In addition, the company favoured a model with a reasonable initial investment and comprehensive scaling options over solutions with high set-up costs.

Besides all this, the issue of data protection is another important aspect for CADENAS when it comes to protecting their own systems and customers – that also serves as an argument for potential new clients. As a German company, CADENAS takes data protection very seriously and aims to reliably protect their server infrastructure as well as their customers' data from access by third parties, always in compliance with the GDPR.

For many European companies today, reliable compliance with the EU General Data Protection Regulation goes hand in hand with the question of data sovereignty – and CADENAS is no exception. Freedom of choice and independence from non-European infrastructures and platforms, which are subject to other – often less strict – data protection guidelines, were key factors in the choice of provider. In this way CADENAS wants to protect themselves and their customers from possible interference and outside access to data – especially from outside the EU –, and deliberately sought a partner that would support the European GAIA-X initiative and provide services in line with the guidelines of this initiative.

A data-secure and resilient SDDC for high scalability and easy virtualisation

CADENAS has opted for a hosted private infrastructure provided by OVHcloud in form of a Software-Defined Datacentre (SDDC). With this solution, OVHcloud provides CADENAS with an isolated and dedicated environment as a hosted private cloud that can be scaled quickly, easily and on demand to provide the best performance even at peak access times. The infrastructure is managed by the cloud provider and reaches an overall availability rate of well over 99.9 per cent. As a result, the CADENAS team is able to focus entirely on the company’s core business.

In OVHcloud as a European provider, CADENAS has found a partner that prioritises data protection and has always placed particular emphasis on the protection of sensitive data. OVHcloud's offering is fully GDPR-compliant and also applies particularly high standards to its non-European data centres in order to protect personal information and company data from access by third parties.

As a founding member of the European GAIA-X initiative, OVHcloud is committed to not using or sharing customer data in any way and thus contributing to the digital sovereignty of its customers. The company actively participates in both GAIA-X and CISPE (Cloud Infrastructure Service Providers in Europe) to ensure security, interoperability and transparency for the safe and confidential use of data. This is why OVHcloud takes technical and structural measures to protect data from access by non-European authorities. For example, the U.S. parts of OVHcloud are in no way involved in the services provided to European customers. As a result, they are even technically unable to comply with possible access requests from US authorities for the transfer of data, such as those provided for in the US Cloud Act. OVHcloud hosts European customer data exclusively in locations within the EU and in countries with a high level of protection as recognised by the European Commission.

When operating outside of the European Union CADENAS therefore uses other servers besides the ones in the German data centre in Augsburg. These servers are hosted in the OVHcloud data centre in Beauharnois, Canada, which offers the required level of protection.

Database and storage systems for the CAD generation backend "PARTserver" and the download portal "PARTcommunity" are hosted at each CADENAS data centre location. For this purpose, databases are replicated bi-directionally and geographically isolated in the data centres. The CAD catalogues generated in Germany are differentiated to Canada and replicated unidirectionally. All of OVHcloud's more than 30 server locations on four continents are fully self-managed and connected to each other via their own fibre optic network. This provides CADENAS with excellent prospects for expansion.

Thanks to the long-standing partnership between the two companies, OVHcloud's Hosted Private Cloud utilises the latest VMware technology, including vSphere, vCenter, NSX and vROps. This allows CADENAS to build on the company's existing expertise in these services and continue to use them in the software-defined data centre. Using the vSphere interface, CADENAS was able to configure their VMs including vRAM, vCPU, storage and network rules and tailor them to the company's needs – without any restrictions thanks to a catalogue of virtual machines.

"It was particularly important for us to have access to quick and easy scaling options to overcome performance bottlenecks in our infrastructure. With OVHcloud this is possible without any problems and, most importantly, in a very short time. The ability to stay on familiar ground with the SDDC while leveraging our existing expertise has made deploying another data centre straightforward."

Ralf Humpfer, Director of IT Systems & Infrastructure at CADENAS

Furthermore, CADENAS can also count on round-the-clock Business Support from the OVHcloud experts. Regardless of the service involved and the urgency of the request, the support team helps CADENASemployees and their customers to solve problems and answer questions about the cloud. The support team is also in constant contact with local data centre teams in order to inform customers about maintenance work well in advance.

Benefits of a dedicated infrastructure in a flexible, managed cloud

Thanks to the particularly smooth and fast provision of a reliable and privacy-compliant infrastructure, OVHcloud was able to ensure an efficient changeover, thus maintaining CADENAS' productivity at a high level during transition. The worldwide availability of OVHcloud's services provides CADENAS with optimal support for operating their online offering. In order to familiarise themselves with the new infrastructure, CADENAS was given the opportunity to try out the future infrastructure for one month free of charge to test possible configuration variants in advance. During the migration of the infrastructure to the OVHcloud data centres, this helped reduce the time of the initial set-up even further. With OVHcloud servers, CADENAS is in a position to use the latest hardware components – for example from Intel – without having to implement or maintain them with their own team on site. After all, OVHcloud's powerful servers are optimised through continuous development.

Thanks to the fast and flexible scalability of the SDDC, CADENAS can also score points with their customers when additional resources are required at short notice, as the systems are always equipped with sufficient resources to easily handle peak access times without having to permanently reserve capacities. Mirroring the databases in two separate and geographically isolated data centres simultaneously ensures a high level of resilience.

Additionally, CADENAS’ customers worldwide can rest assured that their data in the cloud is protected against unauthorised access in accordance with the highest standards. Both inside and outside the European Union, OVHcloud's infrastructure meets comprehensive certification criteria and hosts all information in full compliance with the GDPR and the guidelines of the GAIA-X initiative.

"Thanks to OVHcloud, we have overcome many of the obstacles of the housing concept, improved our performance and can now respond much more easily to changing customer requirements. Our significantly more flexible infrastructure can utilise the latest components and VMware technologies without having to invest a lot of time or manpower and is therefore always up to date in terms of hardware."

Ralf Humpfer, Director of IT Systems & Infrastructure at CADENAS