SaskTel: Making a Red Hat customer success story

Just how awesome are our jobs? Example: We got to spend several weeks playing with LEGO® for a video project. But just how did we convince other rational, professional adults that this would not only be cool, but really support the story that we were trying to tell? I guess we just work with great people, because it didn’t take much convincing.

We were working on a Red Hat customer success story featuring SaskTel, the leading telecommunications provider in Saskatchewan, Canada. The company runs Red Hat Enterprise Linux and use Red Hat Storage to handle an incredible amount of customer data (more than 1.4 million connections!) that rapidly pours in from numerous devices. They’re a Crown corporation which are owned by the British monarchy, so it’s crucial that their services are reliable, and they are accountable to stakeholders in the long-term – basically, they can’t lose data to some creaky server.

A team of Red Hatters – Mike Esser, Brandalyn Powell, Rachel Rooney, Brett Abramsky, and Laura Walters – got in touch with David Yaffe, one of the IT experts at SaskTel who implemented Red Hat Gluster Storage in their datacenter, so that we could help him share SaskTel’s success using Red Hat products. As part of the interview, we also seek to get good B-roll (essentially footage of the company’s operations “operating”), but this is sometimes easier said than done – not every office or industry is necessarily conducive to attaining quality footage.

We found out that David, in addition to being an IT expert, is also a LEGO Master Builder, and we thought there was a good parallel between the foundational blocks of storage and LEGO. We used this imagery to highlight SaskTel’s problem – that they didn’t have an affordable long-term storage solution – and how that was solved with Red Hat Gluster Storage.

Looking behind the scenes, you can get a glimpse of how we made this video. We set up in our on-site studio, and we used power tools, papercraft, hot glue, paint, tiny LED wreath lights, many, many LEGOs, and more to make this diorama world of the SaskTel datacenter come to life. To represent the digital data processed by SaskTel, we used 3D outlined “bricks.”.

Needless to say this was a really fun project, and we think it illustrates the story well. It’s also a good experience for our team when we can effectively tell a Red Hat success story in a unique way, while also relating to our customer on a personal level.