Expeditors: a logistics network inside its own data centre

A global freight forwarder moves shipments through a network of hand-offs, each of which creates a record and a risk. The systems that hold those records carry customer, customs and commercial data that has to stay where the company controls it, and they have to answer in real time to operations running in every time zone. For Expeditors that meant a network inside its own data centre rather than in somebody else's.

The engagement covered the whole of that network: the on-premise architecture, the data layer, the operational systems that run on it, and the capacity and failover that keep it running.

The architecture was planned from the workload rather than from a catalogue: which systems, serving how many operations, with what tolerance for an outage. Compute, networking and storage were designed to match, inside the company's own facility.

The data layer gives the operational systems one definition of a shipment, a party and an event, so a hand-off recorded in one system is the same hand-off in the next. The operational systems sit on top of it, and capacity and failover were designed in from the start rather than added after the first incident.

When a workload cannot go to a public cloud, the engineering has to be better, not simpler. There is no elastic capacity to hide a mistake behind, so monitoring, failover and capacity planning carry the weight that a cloud provider would otherwise carry. The Expeditors network is the reference for Opsian's Data Centers service.