Pacific Textiles drives digital transformation with new infrastructure for legacy and cloud-native applications

March 1st, 2022 — Canonical announces that Pacific Textiles chose Canonical Charmed OpenStack for its infrastructure upgrade. The new private cloud environment allows keeping the legacy workloads running continuously and launching new cloud-native services simultaneously.

The professional services team from Canonical helped Pacific Textiles during this migration, from making architectural choices to launching the live cloud. Ultimately Charmed OpenStack provides an excellent infrastructure for legacy workload and cloud-native experience. Pacific Textiles will have a vendor and technology they can rely on for continuity and flexibility for their workloads with ten years of support.  

Pacific Textiles knew they needed to give their developers easy access to technologies like cloud-native apps, Kubernetes, AI/ML, and others alike.  Canonical therefore provided them with an enterprise-grade containerization technology solution: Charmed Kubernetes. This could not come at the expense of their VM-based legacy workloads. With Charmed OpenStack adoption, Pacific Textiles can now leverage the Ubuntu platform’s technical advantage to cloud-native apps and services with Kubernetes on their OpenStack private cloud. The combination reduced the cost and complexity of their infrastructure and increased their effort on new application development and management. 

For business continuity, the Canonical professional services team worked closely with the technical team at Pacific Textiles to make sure all the legacy workloads migrated smoothly during the transition. The project was also delivered in sets and expected time frames to allow Pacific Textiles to deliver on its ambitious digital transformation goals.

 “Working with Canonical was different from working with all the other OpenStack providers that we’ve interacted with. From the beginning, they had a clearly defined process to get us live and explained all their best practices to us. Once the cloud was configured, built, and tested, it was torn down and automatically rebuilt and tested from the configuration files.”

Ensuring that Day 2 operations are as simple and automated as possible is a crucial consideration for Pacific Textiles. A private cloud built on Charmed OpenStack provides cloud automation for provisioning and orchestration along with inventory and classification. The professional technical team in Pacific Textiles is responsible for the workload migration and the Canonical expert team takes care of the rest, together to make this happen. Simplified Day 2 operations reduce the time and effort for the infrastructure migration and guarantee a low total cost of ownership for the private cloud.

One of the most critical elements in Pacific Textiles’ vendor choice was a long-term commitment to technologies such as OpenStack and Kubernetes. Charmed OpenStack in Pacific Textiles will have ten years of support under extended support maintenance by Canonical. A longer support lifecycle gives the business more time and flexibility to develop, build, innovate, upgrade with the new technology, and most importantly, achieve a better ROI. 

Hubert Tsang, CIO at Pacific Textiles, remarked, “Canonical is miles ahead of other providers where every server is manually configured. We also greatly appreciate that Ubuntu is the platform where OpenStack development occurs. This means we’re not waiting half a year for rebranding and compatibility testing that other OpenStack providers require. If you’re investing in a private cloud, why cripple yourself with outdated software?”

To know more about Charmed OpenStack, please talk to us about your open-source private cloud plan. 

About Canonical

Canonical is the company behind Ubuntu, the leading OS for container, cloud, and hyper-scale computing. Most public cloud workloads use Ubuntu, as do most new smart gateways, switches, self-driving cars, and advanced robots. Canonical provides enterprise support and services for commercial users of Ubuntu. Established in 2004, Canonical is a privately held company.

 About Pacific Textiles 

Pacific Textiles Holdings Limited (SEHK: 01382) is one of the world’s largest fabric mills, providing high-quality customized knitted fabrics to leading apparel brand owners across the globe. Pacific Textiles is headquartered in Hong Kong with production facilities located in China and Vietnam. With billions of garments being created annually from the fabric produced by Pacific Textiles, innovation and sustainability are core values relentlessly pursued by the group to improve product quality and reduce our environmental impact.