Cloud Storage Architecture Gives MSP New Found Flexibility to Respond to Spikes in Application Requirements
One time occurrences that are accompanied by spikes in capacity and performance requirements are the bane of data centers. While many organizations can excuse IT for their inability to respond to unexpected one-time or occasional demands, perceptions and attitudes change when organizations know a heavy load is coming and IT cannot adeptly respond. It is this type of challenge that Carrenza Hosting, a managed hosting company based in London, England, intended to solve when it began to start down the path of adopting cloud-based computing and storage services. Part of its intent was to create a more flexible infrastructure so it could meet a client's forecasted spike in the need for computing and storage resources with minimal or no disruption to the client's application service levels.
The impetus behind my conversation with Carrenza's Director of Information Services, Jason Reid, was sparked by a recent joint press release from 3PAR and Carrenza. 3PAR recently made a technology donation to Carrenza in support of Comic Relief's annual charity event, Red Nose Day. On the surface, 3PAR's contribution seemed well-meaning and innocuous enough but taking advantage of a contribution of storage hardware is not as always as easy as it sounds.
Having previously working in an enterprise data center, installing storage, migrating the application to and from it and then decommissioning the storage once an event is over to return it can be a laborious and time-consuming process - so much so that the effort involved can outweigh whatever benefits the technology was supposed to provide. So to better understand why Carrenza needed this donation and how (and if) it could took advantage of 3PAR's contribution without undue labor I spoke to Jason Reid, Carrenza's Director of Information Services.
Reid explained that Red Nose Day is one of the largest one day charity events in the UK that takes in about $80 million US dollars. Comic Relief, the organization that runs Red Nose Day, normally has a platform that is quite small as there are normally not that many transactions occurring on a day-to-day basis.
But when the Red Nose Day occurs, it goes from needing a very small platform to one that is very large. To support this once-a-year event, Carrenza works with its technology partners (3PAR, Cisco, and HP) to provide extra capacity for the Red Nose application platform just for the duration of the event. Reid says, "Comic Relief does not need this huge platform sitting there for the rest of the year consuming power, costing money and generally being completely unused."
To enable the movement of the application from a small, less-powerful hardware platform to one that can handle these extra transactions, the entire infrastructure behind the Red Nose application is virtualized and highly redundant. So to move it, Carrenza used VMware's vMotion feature to bring up another instance of the application on a more robust hardware platform, migrate the data and then shut down the old instance.
Carrenza's Reid leveraged 3PAR's storage contribution in a slightly different way as 3PAR's contribution came in two forms. 3PAR first contributed extra disk that went into one of Carrenza's 3PAR storage arrays at Carrenza's primary site. This storage was used for the day of the event as it was needed to support the Oracle database back end of the Red Nose application.
3PAR's other technology contribution was made in the form of a second array that was installed at Carrenza's secondary site. This was needed to support an Oracle RAC stretch cluster that was put in place to support the application on the day of the event. Since this cluster configuration has severe distance limitations and Carrenza did not have sufficient capacity at its secondary site to handle the requirements of the Red Nose application, it needed the secondary array from 3PAR to support these requirements.
But most impressive was Reid's testimony as to the ease of implementing the new 3PAR storage and then decommissioning it when the event was complete. Reid estimated that it took at most a day and a half for one of his engineers to configure the storage and get the Red Nose application up and running on the new server and storage hardware, including the syncing of the data between the primary and secondary sites. He says, "There was no impact on the night of the event, it ran perfectly. There is not much more to say than that. We did not have any problems nor did we encounter any performance bottlenecks. Then once the event was over, the storage was just as easy to decommission as it was to setup."
Storage management and data migrations are two of the biggest obstacles that companies now face as they look to respond to occasional or one-time spikes in demand. However as Carrenza's experience with the 3PAR InServ Storage Systems during the Red Nose Day event shows, these obstacles can now be overcome. By using 3PAR as its back end storage platform, Carrenza was able to dynamically and quickly scale out compute, capacity and performance for a client application and, once the event was over, just as easily scale it back to its previous levels with minimal or no disruption to its client and without requiring heroic efforts on the part of its IT staff to accomplish this task.
But what makes this especially interesting is how Carrenza is leveraging its virtualized infrastructure to grow its business and become more competitive. In a forthcoming blog, I'll get into how Carrenza is leveraging 3PAR to deliver this more robust, virtualized infrastructure to lower its costs, set the foundation for the foundation for its future and meet the current and future needs of its clients.
The impetus behind my conversation with Carrenza's Director of Information Services, Jason Reid, was sparked by a recent joint press release from 3PAR and Carrenza. 3PAR recently made a technology donation to Carrenza in support of Comic Relief's annual charity event, Red Nose Day. On the surface, 3PAR's contribution seemed well-meaning and innocuous enough but taking advantage of a contribution of storage hardware is not as always as easy as it sounds.
Having previously working in an enterprise data center, installing storage, migrating the application to and from it and then decommissioning the storage once an event is over to return it can be a laborious and time-consuming process - so much so that the effort involved can outweigh whatever benefits the technology was supposed to provide. So to better understand why Carrenza needed this donation and how (and if) it could took advantage of 3PAR's contribution without undue labor I spoke to Jason Reid, Carrenza's Director of Information Services.
Reid explained that Red Nose Day is one of the largest one day charity events in the UK that takes in about $80 million US dollars. Comic Relief, the organization that runs Red Nose Day, normally has a platform that is quite small as there are normally not that many transactions occurring on a day-to-day basis.
But when the Red Nose Day occurs, it goes from needing a very small platform to one that is very large. To support this once-a-year event, Carrenza works with its technology partners (3PAR, Cisco, and HP) to provide extra capacity for the Red Nose application platform just for the duration of the event. Reid says, "Comic Relief does not need this huge platform sitting there for the rest of the year consuming power, costing money and generally being completely unused."
To enable the movement of the application from a small, less-powerful hardware platform to one that can handle these extra transactions, the entire infrastructure behind the Red Nose application is virtualized and highly redundant. So to move it, Carrenza used VMware's vMotion feature to bring up another instance of the application on a more robust hardware platform, migrate the data and then shut down the old instance.
Carrenza's Reid leveraged 3PAR's storage contribution in a slightly different way as 3PAR's contribution came in two forms. 3PAR first contributed extra disk that went into one of Carrenza's 3PAR storage arrays at Carrenza's primary site. This storage was used for the day of the event as it was needed to support the Oracle database back end of the Red Nose application.
3PAR's other technology contribution was made in the form of a second array that was installed at Carrenza's secondary site. This was needed to support an Oracle RAC stretch cluster that was put in place to support the application on the day of the event. Since this cluster configuration has severe distance limitations and Carrenza did not have sufficient capacity at its secondary site to handle the requirements of the Red Nose application, it needed the secondary array from 3PAR to support these requirements.
But most impressive was Reid's testimony as to the ease of implementing the new 3PAR storage and then decommissioning it when the event was complete. Reid estimated that it took at most a day and a half for one of his engineers to configure the storage and get the Red Nose application up and running on the new server and storage hardware, including the syncing of the data between the primary and secondary sites. He says, "There was no impact on the night of the event, it ran perfectly. There is not much more to say than that. We did not have any problems nor did we encounter any performance bottlenecks. Then once the event was over, the storage was just as easy to decommission as it was to setup."
Storage management and data migrations are two of the biggest obstacles that companies now face as they look to respond to occasional or one-time spikes in demand. However as Carrenza's experience with the 3PAR InServ Storage Systems during the Red Nose Day event shows, these obstacles can now be overcome. By using 3PAR as its back end storage platform, Carrenza was able to dynamically and quickly scale out compute, capacity and performance for a client application and, once the event was over, just as easily scale it back to its previous levels with minimal or no disruption to its client and without requiring heroic efforts on the part of its IT staff to accomplish this task.
But what makes this especially interesting is how Carrenza is leveraging its virtualized infrastructure to grow its business and become more competitive. In a forthcoming blog, I'll get into how Carrenza is leveraging 3PAR to deliver this more robust, virtualized infrastructure to lower its costs, set the foundation for the foundation for its future and meet the current and future needs of its clients.
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