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Case Study
TriCore SolutionsExecutive Summary: TriCore Solutions, a leading cloud provider, needed a new way to expandits services effectively, increase performance, and improve operational efficiencies. To achievethese goals TriCore implemented InfiniBox™, the revolutionary, multi-petabyte storage solution for mission-critical applications from INFINIDAT. The results received from InfiniBox far exceededTriCore’s expectations.
TriCore Solutions is a leading managedapplication services and cloud provider.TriCore provides its customers with a full suite of scalable and reliable managed application, cloud, infrastruc-ture hosting, and consulting services to reduce costs, raise service levels, and improve the customer experience.
Problem: Cost-Effective Growth“TriCore has been rapidly expanding its business, adding new customers andcontinuously increasing capacity. Wequickly realized that we had to find acost-effective and timely solution toadd storage capacity that was closelytied to our customers’ storage growthand needs,” says Peter Salamanca, VP of Infrastructure at TriCore.
“Our existing storage solution camewith tiered storage — three tiers offlash (SSD), SAS and NL-SAS drives.While they were performing well, wewere looking for ways to deliver cost-effective, increased performance fornew data processing and business requirements,” says Matt Iavarone, director of systems & storage infrastructure at TriCore.
The Solution: InfiniBoxInfiniBox is next-generation enterprisestorage at a disruptive price point.Through the use of its patented INFINIDAT Continuum Architecture™
(ICA), INFINIDAT employs commodityhardware to deliver highly efficient,multi-petabyte capacity in a single rack. The InfiniBox solution also deliversmainframe-class reliability, with an unprecedented 99.99999% availabilityand over 900K IOPS of performance.
Automated provisioning, management,and application integration provide asystem that is incredibly efficient andeasy to use.
Reliability and Performance“The installation was incredibly easyand fast,” says Iavarone. “We receivedthe first machine in November 2013,and were so pleased with reliability and performance that we ended up purchasing a second machine — onefor each of our Boston and Chicagodata centers. It is nine months now that
InfiniBox has been running in produc-tion, and it has performed flawlessly.InfiniBox yields huge benefits to cloudproviders that need increasingly largerstorage capacities, yet want to optimizetheir floor space, cooling, and power requirements in their data centers.”
When evaluating the merits of InfiniBox, the TriCore team ran application I/O profiles and comparedthe results to the ones previously received with other storage arrays. “InfiniBox sustained increased times relative to the IOPS that we observedfrom other storage systems, even
though the other arrays included flashdrives. InfiniBox’s performance wasmeasurably superior to other storagesolutions tested,” declares Iavarone.
Online upgrades have been carried out flawlessly, according to Iavarone.“The data on our servers is worth manymillions of dollars in revenues to ourcustomers, so operations cannot be interrupted. When other vendors saythat upgrades are performed onlineand with no interruption, it’s not alwaysthe case. With InfiniBox, all upgrades
have been completely transparent, with no interruption to production.”
Salamanca speaks highly of INFINIDAT’ssupport responsiveness. “When you’recalling support, you are talking withreal engineers who understand the insand outs of the system and provide real guidance.”
Ease of UseIavarone provides a couple of examplesof InfiniBox’s ease of use.
Fast Storage Provisioning: “In thepast, adding a server to the environ-ment required a lengthy provisioning
“InfiniBox yields huge benefits to cloud providersthat need increasingly larger storage capacities,yet want to optimize their floor space, cooling,and power requirements in their data centers.”
Matt Iavarone, Director of Systems & Storage Infrastrucure, TriCore
process: add the host, create a hostgroup, provision the storage, and assign it to the host. InfiniBox automates the provisioning process, so it’s significantly faster and savesvaluable time for storage folks like me. Provisioning storage for InfiniBox takes me about five minutes.”
Learning Curve: “Each new storagesystem has its own new things and requires a significant amount of training. With InfiniBox, the learningcurve is minimized. Its highly intuitivemanagement interface enables engineers to start managing the systemimmediately. If you’ve ever managedany storage system before, you can easily and quickly start managing InfiniBox.”
Integration with Other EnvironmentsTriCore uses InfiniBox to run its customers’ mission-critical systems, including Oracle EBS and PeopleSoft,and Microsoft Exchange and SharePoint. Operating systems running on InfiniBox include Linux, Windows, AIX, HP-UX, and Solaris, and the virtual environments include VMwareand Oracle VM. TriCore also built anOpenStack environment and plans touse InfiniBox’s APIs to directly provisionstorage to the Cinder service, thus taking an entire layer out of the way and significantly improving performance.
“InfiniBox’s RESTful interface is anothermeaningful advantage. It enables us to manage hosts and storage, provisioning, and collect performance
statistics — all from any other interface.This is far simpler and faster to achievethan we had previously experienced.With InfiniBox, it is very easy, and the output we get is JSON, which isstandards-based — we don’t have to install anything, just use the webbrowser to get all of the reporting,monitoring and also to manage the system,” says Iavarone.
InfiniBox’s Unbelievable TCO“A major advantage of InfiniBox is its absolutely revolutionary pricing —both per GB and per IO. InfiniBox’s pricing is a fraction of the price thatwe’ve seen from other, comparable solutions,” says Salamanca.
He adds that another huge bonus to InfiniBox is INFINIDAT’s software licensing model. “With InfiniBox, allsoftware licenses are included with the hardware at no additional cost —both current licenses and future ones.This is a significant advantage from aTCO perspective, and it also simplifiesthe management of the storage environment — I know that I can get any software I need without having to increase our cost per storage unit.”
ConclusionINFINIDAT provides the next-generation enterprise-class storage,with unparalleled capacity, performance, reliability, and ease of use, all at a disruptive price point.
“We needed a SAN environment that runs at the top performancelevel for our customers and provides us with sufficient capacityfor future growth. That’s what we got with InfiniBox.”
Peter Salamanca, VP of Infrastructure, TriCore
© INFINIDAT 2016
CS-TRICORE-151230-US
