Published On: 25th June 20203.7 min readTags: , , , ,

Business challenge

In 1998, Toronto Internet Exchange (TorIX), the first non-profit internet exchange in Toronto, was created to directly connect the internet traffic of Canadian businesses by using local network infrastructure. A group of experts collaborated to establish TorIX with the intention of overcoming the cost and latency issues of having Canadian traffic flow through the United States. Today, TorIX has over 250 organizations connected with access to direct routes from many diverse peering partners.

As a non-profit organization, TorIX focuses on investing funds into infrastructure, so that its technology can stay up to date to remain at the forefront of the Internet Exchange Point (IXP) industry. Previously, TorIX was using a VMware installation with no replication, however it wanted to avoid large, hardware-dependent installations associated with vSAN and to find a solution better fitted for its long-term needs.

TorIX began the process of evaluating market options for an infrastructure solution to power its IT operations that was high-performing, simple and easy to manage. More specifically, TorIX was searching for a solution that it could trust with managing all of its critical external services for customers, including its online portal systems, telemetry data, web and mail applications.

Solution

To power its non-profit internet exchange, TorIX needed a hyperconverged solution between its two datacenters with high performance and availability. After evaluating multiple options, TorIX found that StorMagic SvSAN best suited its needs because it was simple for its IT team to manage and easy to upgrade, while still remaining cost effective and modern. Furthermore, SvSAN’s stretch/metro cluster capability enabled TorIX to install its two SvSAN nodes 3 kilometers apart with no impact on performance thanks to SvSAN’s low bandwidth requirements.

TorIX now has a two-node cluster consisting of Cisco servers and VMware vSphere as the hypervisor. With SvSAN, TorIX can easily manage its IT infrastructure with 100 percent redundancy and high availability. SvSAN powers all of TorIX’s critical external services for customers, such as web and mail applications, online portal systems and telemetry data. TorIX has reported maximum uptime in operations, delivering powerful direct internet routes to peering partners without interruptions.

In addition, throughout the pre- and post-implementation process, TorIX found StorMagic’s world-class, 24/7 customer support highly responsive and helpful with technical expertise.

Why StorMagic

  • Easy to Manage: At the top of TorIX’s priority list was a hyperconverged solution that was easy for its IT team to manage, which is why the company turned to SvSAN. TorIX found that SvSAN is reliable and simple to manage for its day-to-day operations.
  • Uptime: High data availability is critical to TorIX and their loyal customers. SvSAN delivers maximum uptime, so that the non-profit has peace of mind that its systems will not fail.
  • 100 Percent Redundancy: TorIX trusts StorMagic’s high availability for critical applications that would pose severe consequences to customers if taken offline. With SvSAN, TorIX now has 100 percent redundancy and downtime has been virtually eliminated.
  • High Performance: SvSAN creates highly available shared storage across two nodes. TorIX has greatly improved performance rates since after making the switch to StorMagic.

Technical Configuration

SvSAN License SvSAN 6TB Platinum
Servers Cisco UCS C240 M5
CPU 2x Xeon Silver 4114 2.2G CPU 10c
Memory 256GB
Storage Capacity 5.4TB
Disk Configuration UCS/LSI MegaRAID, RAID 5, 6×1.2T + 2x400G SSD Cache (RAID 1)
Networking 3Km between remote site and datacenter, using both 10Gbps and 100Gbps; 2 network cards per server
Hypervisor VMware vSphere Essentials Plus Kit
Applications Online portal systems, telemetry data, web and mail applications

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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