Delivering energy solutions at the edge

Snam, one of the world’s largest gas networks, has deployed Red Hat OpenShift and other cloud-native technologies to help drive the organization’s digital transformation. Using a broad set of Red Hat’s powerful open hybrid cloud solutions, Snam can better manage and scale applications across distributed infrastructure, including at the edge, to prepare for a hybrid cloud and multicloud future.

Headquartered in San Donato Milanese, Italy, Snam oversees one of the world’s largest natural gas transportation networks, 2 LNG terminals and the largest European natural gas storage capacity; it has participations in GCA, TAG (Austria), Terega (France), Interconnector UK (UK), DESFA (Greece), TAP, and ADNOC Gas Pipeline (UAE). Snam’s mission is to help guide the evolution of energy transition by providing an innovative sustainable energy network that enables more stable supplies to Europe, while developing new businesses and technologies fostering a low-carbon future, such as H2 and biomethane.

In an effort to better serve the digital needs of its internal operations, while being able to provide the digital agility and flexibility its new business units require to succeed, Snam undertook a company-wide digital transformation program. Backed by the open hybrid cloud expertise and technologies from Red Hat, Snam has started to renew its existing application map and make interactions leaner and more effective among its business services, while developing an entirely new technology stack for its IoT and data needs, designed to be ready to connect up to 30,000 devices and able to handle 100x more data, enabling the intelligent network.

Snam deployed several Red Hat technologies and services to support this evolution, including: 

Red Hat OpenShift, the industry’s leading enterprise Kubernetes platform, as the flexible foundation to run and scale applications across its current on-premises datacenters extending out to the edge. This also included Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation, which provides software-defined storage for containerized applications.

Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes to deploy and manage clusters and applications at a number of edge locations distributed throughout Italy.

Red Hat Quay as the global registry platform for efficiently managing containerized content across data centers and to the edge, focusing on cloud-native and DevSecOps development models and environments.

Red Hat Integration solutions to connect disparate and distributed applications and data.

Red Hat Consulting to support the IT team with the design, build and deployment, as well as the implementation of agile frameworks and methodologies, including DevOps, CI/CD and software-defined datacenter and networking.

Through the adoption of Red Hat technologies, Snam can now deploy applications in an automated manner in as little as 30 minutes, improving by more than 10x the time to delivery of its new software products. Red Hat OpenShift has been deployed on-premises and on the edge of the network, with Snam also taking advantage of the public cloud, using Microsoft Azure Red Hat OpenShift, a jointly engineered managed Red Hat OpenShift service supported by Microsoft and Red Hat. This enables Snam to scale workloads and applications across any public or private cloud in order to meet future business requirements, reducing potential risks around cloud lock-in, and helping streamline the platformization of its application map, while being flexible to consume and provide new digital data and services, leveraging its business expertise and the opportunities offered by the current pace of digital technologies evolution.