By running Red Hat OpenShift on bare metal across two regional data centres, Telenet Business has established a sovereign private cloud
Telenet Business selected Red Hat OpenShift as the foundation for its modern private cloud infrastructure. The company is part of the Telenet Group, which in turn is part of Liberty Global. It is a managed service provider with more than 10,000 business customers across Belgium.
By selecting Red Hat OpenShift as its standards-based, open platform, Telenet Business is consolidating virtual machines (VMs) and container workloads. This unified foundation helped Telenet to remove the friction of separate infrastructure stacks and improve operational control without limiting innovation or impacting the customer experience.
Telenet Business deployed Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization, a feature native to Red Hat OpenShift, to establish a unified, locally-controlled foundation for virtual machines and containers. The aim is to meet the rising demand for localised compute and a highly responsive and scalable infrastructure: Telenet adopted open technologies that provide long-term stability and operational control.
One platform, any workload, any infrastructure
By running Red Hat OpenShift on bare metal across two regional data centres, Telenet Business has established a sovereign private cloud environment. VMs and containerised applications coexist on the same hardware and management layer, providing a consistent operational model that extends to overseeing predictive and generative AI models at scale.
To manage this environment, Telenet Business uses Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes to provide a single management view across both data centre clusters. This centralised oversight allows the system to automatically spin up VMs at the alternate location if one site becomes unavailable, supporting continuous service availability for Telenet’s customers.
According to Red Hat, this open hybrid cloud approach provides:
- Rapid migration with minimal disruption – using the Red Hat migration toolkit for virtualization, Telenet Business has already migrated close to 200 VMs out of a scope of nearly 1,000. The toolkit automates complex transition tasks and supports 50GB VM transitions in just a few minutes, with near-zero service downtime.
- Unified management of VMs and containers – Telenet Business is removing the complexity of separate infrastructure stacks, with engineers managing VMs, containers and the underlying physical hardware through a single interface. This integration helps teams move applications to container deployments faster for increased portability and more efficient operations.
- Controllable cloud and sovereign design – all workloads remain hosted within Telenet Business’s Belgian data centres to support strict data residency requirements for government and enterprise clients. Data is replicated four times across two sites to support high availability without reliance on extraterritorial public cloud providers.
- Scalable automation – Telenet Business uses Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform to automate VM provisioning and templating. This makes the solution accessible to teams across the company and reduces manual intervention.
- Open source flexibility – Red Hat’s open source development model was a strategic decision for Telenet to regain architectural freedom and choice from its previous proprietary stack.
Dave Van Ingelghem, Technical Product Manager, Datacenter, Telenet Business. said, “Telenet Business requires a platform that helps strengthen the protection of our data without sacrificing the ability to modernise. Red Hat OpenShift has been a positive step toward a future-ready environment by allowing us to consolidate our workloads onto a single platform and automate recovery across sites. With Red Hat, we have the flexibility to choose our own future as we evolve to serve customers.”
