Business Challenge
ITsjefen AS is a flexible hosting and managed services provider, whose workforce is passionate about technology and customer service. Anders Kringstad, Solutions Architect for ITsjefen, was looking for ways to improve system performance, and as a result, provide a highly available service to their customers. Each customer has different application and service requirements so Anders required a flexible, simple and cost-effective solution that provides storage and performance.
Having reviewed the storage and hyperconvergence markets and rejected the options available, a chance conversation with a fellow IT professional led them to StorMagic SvSAN.
Anders thoroughly lab tested SvSAN and found even when they crashed the server by pulling out the power, SvSAN ensured the 40 virtual machines failed over resulting in zero downtime.
“We’ve seen a ten-fold increase in performance on those servers running SvSAN – it used to be 50MB/second, now it’s 500-800MB/second – plus we see outstanding hardware redundancy on a two-node cluster,” says Anders.
“Redundancy is ridiculous, SvSAN gives us five 9s, the gold-standard of redundancy. We’ve built a solution with SvSAN that offers our customers a ten-fold improvement in performance, and at half the cost.”
Solution
For each customer, ITsjefen has installed SvSAN on a dedicated pair of Dell servers virtualized using VMware vSphere hypervisors and stretched across two of their locations to provide additional resiliency against datacenter outage (power, fire, etc). SvSAN turns the internal disk of the hosted server infrastructure into highly available shared storage. This is is used by an average 20 virtual machines per server to run the customer’s individual business applications. The data is protected and they are assured of business continuity. The environment is backed up at the primary datacenter using Veeam back-up.
Why StorMagic?
Impressed by the performance, Anders was equally impressed by the simplicity of implementing and managing SvSAN, he says “it just works and then gets out of your way”. With multiple customer environments to support, this is of vital importance to ITsjefen. The customer systems now running SvSAN have enjoyed zero downtime, enabling ITsjefen to show a 100% service level on performance. Maintenance can also be undertaken during business hours, so no overtime is required, as work can be done on one server while the other runs the customer’s business and then service is rolled back to the updated server while work is completed on the second server.
Technical Configuration
| Server Configuration (Per Server) | |
| SvSAN License | SvSAN Unlimited TB Platinum |
| Hardware | Dell |
| CPU | 2 per server |
| Memory | 192GB to 384GB per server |
| Storage | RAID 6 (Double Parity) |
| Networking | 2 x 10GbE connected via switches |
| Hypervisor | VMware vSphere 6.0 Enterprise Plus Edition |
| Applications | A typical configuration would be: 20 VMs per VSA server running a mix of Windows Server 2012 R2 and 2008 R2, Linux Ubuntu and Centos.
Applications: |
| Data Protection | Veeam |
Simple
Provides a true ‘set and forget’ solution for any environment using centralized deployment and management – whether for thousands of sites or just one.
Cost-Effective
Eliminates physical SANs by converging compute and storage into a lightweight commodity server footprint thereby dramatically lowering costs.
Flexible
Delivers on today’s performance needs leveraging any CPU and storage type whilst avoiding over-provisioning with the confidence of scaling for tomorrow’s demands.
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