How a Cloud Computing Service Provider Used Utility Storage to Maximize Virtual Server and Desktop ROI Gary Collins – CTO & Co-founder

About Intercept

Company formed in 2002 Privately owned 45+ Employees £10m Annual Revenue First to market with onlinedesktop™ 2000 hosted users across 87 different companies

What We Do

On-premise Services

Optimising on-premise deployments using the latest in virtualisation technologies

OnlineServices

Enterprise IT with no capital outlay for a simple low cost

monthly subscription

ManagedServices

Proactive consultancy and specialist support to help

achieve your business goals

ServersDesktopsApplicatio

nsStorage

onlinecrm™onlinemail™

onlinecomms™onlinedesktop™

onlineworkspace™

Multi Vendor SupportRemote Monitoring

Pro-active DaysSelective Sourcing

The Journey to Utility Storage (2002 to 2005)

Service Launched mid 2002 2 Data Centres (London and Milton Keynes) Physical Servers Storage on DAS and Fibre Channel SAN Software based replication

Storage Architecture v1 (2002 to 2006)

Host Host Host

Drive Loop A Drive Loop BDrive Loop

A

Drive Loop B

LondonData Centre

Milton Keynes Data Centre

Software replication from primary to secondary Host Host Host

The Journey to Utility Storage (2006 to 2009)

January 2006 – Experienced a Situation…! Issue with an array reporting incorrect size Software solution replicated the changes

Breach of SLA, total customer rebates of £50,000+

Re-architected the storage infrastructure Maximum uptime and resilience Improved data protection levels Never lose any data

Storage Architecture v2 (2006 to 2009)

Host Host Host

IPStor01 IPStor02

Spare FC connectionsResumes the WWN name of IPStor 1 in

failover scenario

Spare FC connectionsResumes the WWN name of IPStor 2 in

failover scenario

Drive Loop A Drive Loop B

Drive Loop A Drive Loop B

Drive Loop

A

Drive Loop B

IPStor03

LondonData Centre

Milton Keynes Data Centre

Synchronous Mirroring

Writes from hosts in London are written to both London SAN’s at the same time (synchronously)

protecting against SAN/RAID or DISK failure.

Data from London is then sent asynchronously to a 3rd SAN in Milton Keynes

Timemarks are held at both London and Milton Keynes

The Journey to Utility Storage (2006 to 2009)

Data protection levels were excellent Management was extremely easy Growing Virtual Server Infrastructure Growing Storage Requirements VM’s have different behaviours (70% write / 30% read) Challenges balancing capacity against performance

Unpredictable workloads due to customer multi-tenancy Regularly reconfiguring arrays to improve performance Heavy over allocation of capacity

The Journey to Utility Storage (2009 to Current)

Scoped out requirements: Performance (IOPS) Capacity (TeraBytes) TCO / Management Costs / Budgets / ROI

Started conversations with existing Intercept suppliers (EqualLogic, HDS, NetApp, EMC)

3PAR recommended by existing Intercept customers

The Journey to Utility Storage (2009 to Current)

Why did we choose 3PAR? Guaranteed Performance Levels (IOPS & Latency) Thin Provisioning Thin Replication Thin Reclamation Wide Striping Dynamic Optimisation Adaptive Optimisation References from Carphone Warehouse and large Scottish Bank

Storage Architecture v3 (2009 to Current)

Host Host Host

LondonData Centre

Milton Keynes Data Centre

Continuous Data Replication + Periodic Snapshots

Sized for 20,000 IOPS with less than 10ms Latency

Benchmarked at 32,000 IOPS with less than 5ms Latency

Logical Solution Overview

Standby Nodes Hot DR Servers

Customer Site

MPLS

Snap shots

SAN 1

Regular Snapshots held in both data centres

Mirror to second data centre

Snap shots

Mirror at second data centre

Regular Snapshots held in both data

centres

Roaming / Home Users

Virtual Infrastructure (Application servers)

Replicated to DR

Application Resilient Clusters

SAN 2

Primary Data CentreBricklane

Virtual Infrastructure Replica

Secondary Data CentreMilton Keynes

Internet

What's Next?

"Over time, a small business will not have economies of scale to make it worth staying in the IT business. Within five years, a huge percentage of small businesses will get most of their computing resources from external cloud providers.” Source: Thomas Bittman, Gartner

Continual Storage Expansion (Capacity & Performance) Evaluation of Enterprise SSD’s Extra Nodes when we hit current limits

In Summary

Phenomenal Performance Levels Increased virtual machine density 67% Reduction in storage footprint

Thin Provisioning and Thin Reclamation 50% Reduction in storage-related power consumption Happy Customers Happy Staff Happy CTO

Any Questions?

Thank you for your time

Visit Intercept on Stand 459

www.intercept-it.com

Visit 3PAR on Stand 847

www.3par.com