BTC AG is a leading IT consulting company in Germany. The BTC Group has branches in China, Japan, Poland, Romania, Switzerland, Turkey and the USA. Headquartered in Oldenburg, Germany, the group has more than 2,500 employees and partners with SAP, AWS and Microsoft. In 2023, BTC generated revenue of approximately 300 million euros.
BTC has a leading position in the energy, telecommunications, public sector, industry and services sectors with a holistic, industry-focused IT consulting offering that includes consulting, systems integration and application and systems management. Another focus is on energy-related software products.
BTC supports energy companies in managing the energy transition, shapes the digital transformation in industry and services, and guides public sector organizations into the digital age. Many of the company's customers are subject to strict security regulations and must reliably protect their infrastructure against cyber risks. BTC helps these organizations implement necessary security measures to comply with regulations such as those from the German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI). This includes operating compliant IT services in its own ISO-certified data centers. BTC became a Diamond Partner in SUSE's MSP program in 2024.
At-a-Glance
Critical infrastructure providers across Germany rely on IT services from BTC, a SUSE Managed Service Provider (MSP). Among other things, the company is accelerating the rollout of smart electricity meters in Germany with innovative digital platforms. Over the next few years, more than one million metering systems will be connected to these central gateway platforms. With SUSE Rancher Suite, BTC ensures reliable, highly automated operation of the containerized applications, scaling the underlying Kubernetes infrastructure quickly and cost-effectively.
Building platforms for tomorrow's energy solutions
One of BTC's most important projects in recent years was the development of different smart metering platforms for leading energy service providers. The platforms provide the technological basis for connecting smart metering systems in homes and businesses to grid operators, metering point operators and energy suppliers via standard interfaces.
“These projects plays a key role in Germany’s legally mandated digital energy transition,” explains Jörg Reisenweber, System Manager in the automation unit at BTC. “In the coming years, smart meters will be rolled out across the country to make electricity consumption more transparent and to reduce energy costs through adapted consumption patterns.” It is planned that at least one million smart meters will be connected to the new platforms by 2030.
The platforms developed by BTC handle important tasks in the operation of smart meters. “We quickly realized we needed a modern, containerized software architecture for setting up and running the smart metering platforms,“ says Reisenweber. “This is the only way we can achieve the scalability and availability we need for this critical service — and quickly adapt the platforms to new requirements.“ BTC looked for a solution to efficiently and securely manage the containerized workloads and Kubernetes clusters, ultimately choosing SUSE Rancher Suite, a solution packages that includes SUSE Rancher Prime, SUSE Virtualization, SUSE Storage, SUSE Security and SUSE Observability among other tools.
"SUSE has given us the ability to scale the smart metering platforms as needed to connect one million smart meters by 2030. The economic aspects are also very easy to plan for us and our customers. With the additional virtualization solution from VMware, it would have been almost impossible for us to predict how the costs for the platforms would evolve over the coming years."
Why SUSE solutions?
For business-critical Linux applications
BTC has relied on SUSE technologies for nearly two decades. It implemented its first SAP applications for customers on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server in 2004. “SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications were always our first choice for running SAP solutions because they ensured stable and reliable operations,” says Reisenweber.
Due to various customer projects, BTC grew its SUSE Linux Enterprise environment to several hundred instances. In 2012, the company became an early adopter of SUSE Multi-Linux Manager, which simplified keeping the growing number of systems up to date and consistent, as well as managing other Linux distributions from a central platform.
Simultaneously, BTC began building a virtualization architecture based on OpenNebula and Fujitsu blade servers. The IT team implemented the SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability Extension for customer environments that require high availability to avoid service downtime. With this SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability Extension, the IT team monitors individual services and applications of a cluster and automatically initiates failover processes in the event of failures.
During this phase, BTC began working with SUSE consultants, who provided valuable input for its complex, multi-tenant infrastructure. "Today, we have 10 SUSE Multi-Linux Manager proxies, some of which are running in customer environments in the cloud,” says Reisenweber. “Engaging with SUSE Consulting has enabled us to optimize this distributed infrastructure and minimize latency times during updates.”
BTC's infrastructure currently consists of approximately 1,900 Linux instances, 80% of which run SUSE Linux Enterprise. The IT service provider uses these systems to run applications for about 50 customers. Thanks to SUSE solutions, managing the infrastructure and deploying new server images is now largely automated. Using the Salt components of SUSE Multi-Linux Manager, the BTC IT team has eliminated many manual processes in configuration, repository and image management.
For enterprise container management
BTC’s success with SUSE influenced its decision to deploy Rancher Prime. "The SUSE Consultants and the SUSE Premium Support Engineer have provided excellent support over the years, so we knew we could rely on SUSE to help us meet the new challenges around containers and Kubernetes," says Reisenweber.
BTC tested Rancher Prime in a smaller Kubernetes project and was impressed with the platform's performance. The IT team was particularly pleased with the simplicity of Rancher's intuitive user interface, which accelerated BTC’s first Kubernetes cluster deployment and minimized ongoing management efforts.
"For the successful implementation of the smart metering platforms, we needed a solution to manage Kubernetes clusters efficiently and largely automatically. We also wanted to make provisioning infrastructure and storage resources as easy as possible. That's why it was so valuable for us that SUSE Rancher Suite also includes the SUSE Virtualization and SUSE Storage components," says Timon Schnell, System Manager for shared service managed platform services at BTC.
SUSE Virtualization is an open source, virtualization solution for managing and orchestrating virtualized and containerized workloads. SUSE Virtualization uses SUSE Linux Enterprise Micro KVM virtualization hosts, sharing the same reliable SUSE Linux Enterprise technology that BTC has used for years. The solution enabled BTC to consolidate and manage IT resources across multiple infrastructures. SUSE Virtualization’s integrated KubeVirt technology also allowed BTC to replace its VMware virtualization solution.
BTC also chose SUSE Storage as its cloud native, distributed storage platform. The combination of SUSE Storage and Rancher Prime makes it easier to provide highly available, persistent block storage for the Kubernetes environment. "SUSE Storage supports ReadWriteMany storage, allowing multiple pods to access the same storage volume simultaneously. While this is not yet a requirement for the smart metering project, we wanted to support this option in the future," says Schnell.
The impact of SUSE solutions
BTC’s strong working relationship with the SUSE Consulting team paid off during the project implementation. Within a month, BTC deployed the first Kubernetes cluster for the smart metering platforms. "We were surprised at how quickly we saw results," says Schnell. "This was only possible because our teams work together very productively and the technologies we use complement each other perfectly."
Provides the scalability to keep up with future energy management needs
BTC initially installed SUSE Virtualization on 12 powerful servers from Fujitsu. The team designing the infrastructure knew the smart metering platforms would have to process rapidly growing amounts of data. The servers were equipped with fast NVMe SSDs and 4x25G network ports per server.
As requirements grow, BTC can quickly increase the performance of the platforms. With Rancher Prime, the team can easily add resources to a cluster as the current workload demands. At the same time, SUSE Virtualization's hyperconverged infrastructure makes it easy to expand and integrate additional physical servers, all controlled through the centralized Rancher Prime interface.
"SUSE has given us the ability to scale the smart metering platforms as needed to connect one million smart meters by 2030. The economic aspects are also easy to plan for us and our customers. With the additional virtualization solution from VMware, it would have been almost impossible for us to predict how the costs for the platforms would evolve over the coming years," says Schnell.
Relieves the IT team and ensures predictable results through automation
In addition to scalability, the BTC IT team appreciates the high level of automation in the solution architecture. The IT team embraces the infrastructure-as-code approach and fully controls the deployment of Kubernetes clusters through GitLab, Terraform and Rancher Prime.
"Everything we deploy in our Kubernetes environment today was previously designed in GitLab," Schnell points out. "Using Terraform jobs and the Rancher API, we can create clusters, request resources from SUSE Virtualization, and provision storage capacity via SUSE Storage with the push of a button." The images used for deployment come from SUSE Multi-Linux Manager and are also documented in GitLab, ensuring that all nodes look exactly the same. Additionally, an automated code review process is performed in the CI/CD pipeline, checking the source code for errors and adherence to coding standards.
"The seamless interaction of SUSE solutions with other cloud native technologies gives us 100% predictable results," says Schnell. "This is the only way we can run the Kubernetes infrastructure for the smart metering platforms with a small team."
Enables centralized management and consistent application of security settings
With SUSE, BTC met the high security requirements of the new platforms. The infrastructure now runs entirely on the SUSE Linux Micro operating system, which is largely executed in read-only mode. This minimized the potential attack surface for cyberattacks and the risk of data loss.
"We prioritized maximum security when designing the platforms and enabled all the security features offered by Kubernetes and Rancher Prime by default," says Reisenweber. "The entire environment is protected by air-gapping and is not directly connected to the internet.” With Rancher Prime, BTC also ensures that consistent security settings are applied to all clusters and that access policies are centrally managed.
The Kubernetes environment is hardened according to Center for Internet Security (CIS) recommendations. SUSE technology allows BTC to perform automated security scans to verify that all CIS best practices have been followed in configuring the Kubernetes clusters. The results of these scans indicate where additional security measures are needed.
“We are currently testing the container security platform SUSE Security, which is included in the SUSE Rancher Suite,” says Schnell, "SUSE Security brings advanced security features such as end-to-end vulnerability management and a container firewall, which we could use to make the platforms more resilient and address new types of cyber risks. Among other things, we get a complete overview of the data streams in the cluster and can automatically block unknown traffic.”
BTC as SUSE Managed Service Provider
As BTC went live with the smart metering platforms, more and more customers were asking for support in running their Kubernetes environments. The company therefore decided to expand its business in this area and become an official SUSE Managed Service Provider (MSP). As a result, BTC benefits from closer collaboration with SUSE, comprehensive technical support and simplified procurement processes.
“As a SUSE MSP, we can flexibly deliver the licenses and services our customers need and don't have to determine potential demand in advance when planning customer projects," says Lutz Logemann, Solution Architect at BTC, who is also responsible for license management. “The clear pricing model and the good support from our contacts at SUSE have made it much easier for us to get started in the MSP program.”
Within a few months, a double-digit number of BTC specialists completed the required technical and sales certifications. As a result, BTC immediately achieved Diamond status, the highest level in SUSE's MSP partner program.
Reisenweber is convinced that this step will pay off very quickly for the company: “Together with SUSE, we can offer every customer a platform for application modernization – a ‘safe airport’ from which they can take off with their software projects. In our first demo, we are already showing interested parties how easy it is: With SUSE Rancher Suite, our team can deploy a complete Kubernetes cluster, including monitoring and visualization, in just 20 minutes.”
What’s next for BTC?
The BTC team is currently looking into the new and extended features that SUSE is making available with the SUSE Rancher Suite. In particular, the specialists are evaluating the possible uses of SUSE Observability. “The solution provides us with comprehensive insights into our customers' Kubernetes clusters,” explains Schnell. “With more than 40 preconfigured dashboards, we can monitor system performance in detail and continuously optimize performance. Based on the collected data, SUSE Observability identifies potential problems and automatically suggests preventive measures. This makes our managed Kubernetes services even more attractive for our customers.”