Customer Success Story : Wimi

Who is Wimi Cloud Solutions?

Wimi is a cloud collaboration platform designed specifically for SMEs, which offers both file sharing and project management features. The company was founded in 2010, headquartered in Paris (France) with a second office location in Sophia Antipolis. As of today, Wimi employs more than 25 people and has 55,000 corporate clients worldwide.

Wimi Cloud Solutions allows team members within organizations to collaborate and centralize all data related to a project or a mission. The SaaS-based application is designed to be fully flexible and adaptable to customers’ needs. It provides an easy-to-use interface for all aspects of effective collaboration (file sharing, project and task management, chat, etc.). Equipped with identity access management, the suite is designed for professional use.

The solution is suitable for enterprises ranging from small to large organizations such as the French National Assembly, who since 2019 have relied on Wimi to strengthen the collaborative work between parliamentarians.

2020 brought new challenges and an unprecedented shift towards homeworking. Wimi acted fast to introduce new offers to public organizations and SMEs. Notably, public sector companies can benefit from 3 months free access to their platform, including 100GB of storage and an unlimited number of users.

Because the protection of citizens’ data has always been a priority for Wimi, in April 2020 they started the process of obtaining the SecNumCloud qualification in order to be recognized as a highly secure cloud computing solution. In September they passed the first part of the ongoing qualification process.

Their Project

To ensure a reliable and highly available infrastructure solution, Wimi built a private network between their different machines. This enabled the company to provide a secure communication environment, all while safeguarding the data of more than 50,000 active users. As such, Wimi relies on the quality of Scaleway Dedibox’s dedicated servers.

Their Solution

The Wimi Cloud Solution is hosted on a steadily growing number of Dedibox servers of the Core, Pro, and Store product lines using Intel XEON CPUs and AMD EPYC CPUs.

The technical stack primarily relies on Core-series Dedibox servers, which are running on Debian Linux and host several KVM virtual machines. The machines transmit in large clusters using QinQ + MACSEC over RPNv2 VLANs for secured communication with high bandwidth available while maintaining low latencies

A Technical Point of View

The front-facing virtual machines are running Nginx web servers, and their task is to serve static content quickly. The Nginx web servers communicate with the back-end machines as well as KVM virtual machines. These run PHP-FPM and dynamically generate the pages requested by users. This separation allows the company to quickly spin up new servers, either for their front or back-end needs, depending on the workload.

All the user data (documents, files, photos, and more) uploaded to Wimi drive are stored on a Ceph cluster of Store-2-L Dedibox servers and mirrored on backup devices.

Their internal database runs PostgreSQL. Data is written to the master database, but all read requests are handled by two synchronized replicas. A third asynchronous replica is available for backup purposes. These database servers handle about 2 million rows of reading requests per second.

Node.js technology has also gained importance with the development of micro-services. It exploits the full potential of the RPNv2 network on large clusters, where it crosses many high throughput streams while maintaining excellent latency. The RPNv2 allows secure communication over a dedicated VLAN, on a private 10Gbit/s network connection between the servers. This enables Wimi to guarantee the security and privacy of its customers’ data, which are often classified as confidential.

The numerous simultaneous incoming HTTP requests per second are distributed to the different virtual machines by load balancers running HAproxy for redundancy, providing more than 8 Gbit/s of switching capacity to the public Internet.

Scaleway Asset

The company ultimately migrated its infrastructure to Scaleway Dedibox in 2016, trusting the expertise and reliability of the services provided. Furthermore, given their work with the French public sector, the ability to host data completely on French soil and remain compliant with GDPR was another appealing factor.

Dougwald Catalan, CTO of Wimi Cloud Solutions, told us: “We require dedicated hardware to provide services that we can fully manage by ourselves to protect our customers’ data. Scaleway’s RPN feature allows us to create our private VLAN between our servers.” He added, “the 24/7 technical assistance provided by Scaleway Dedibox via phone and ticketing is a great plus”.

To handle the upsurging demand in the SaaS sector, following the recent strong growth of remote work, Wimi Cloud Solutions was able to quickly add servers that were already reserved for them and ready when needed. Additional orders were delivered by Scaleway Dedibox to keep up with the growth and to increase processing capacity, bandwidth, and storage requirements by WIMI’s users.