Open-E’s JovianDSS Software Used by ReadSoft

Open-E, Inc. announced a successful upgrade form DSS V7 to software-defined JovianDSS, based on ZFS.

ReadSoft‘s software, a Lexmark company, extracts information from business documents and uses it for automated document sorting, information matching against ERP systems, and approval workflows. They were using DSS V7 for a quite a long time, for fast iSCSI storage in VMware cluster environments and for all R&D data. DSS V7 enabled easy management of the server infrastructure from different locations, as their storage was placed in Hamburg, Frankfurt, Stockholm, Malmö, Helsingborg and Copenhagen.

As the company’s R&D requirements grew, the IT environment needed to be refreshed. DSS V7 met their expectations, but the company required a solution that offers higher performance, is scalable, easy to set up, as well as highly secure. Also, especially in regards to hardware RAID controllers, any existing single points of failure were to be avoided. Thus, ReadSoft decided to implement software-defined JovianDSS which is based on ZFS.

With thin provisioning and compression in JovianDSS, between 60%-80% of extra storage could be gained in comparison to the physical size of the array. ReadSoft’s storage administrators have better insights into SAN and disks. They have increased the overall efficiency and have a better option for multiple disk problem monitoring. Moreover, thanks to HA storage environment, the company is now able to achieve BC by aggregating resources into virtual pools in the company’s VMware cluster.

All of their existing hardware – 21 SANs in total – was replaced with HP DL360 servers. For six months now, the storage solution runs on a 10GbE network and the infrastructure includes HP DL360 servers connected with HP d2700 cabinet that consists of 25 SAS 10,000rpm disks in a JBOD configuration. ReadSoft uses DC3700 series disks for SSD cache which are mounted directly in the servers.

Per Eklund, head IT, ReadSoft, is happy with the solution: “We have been very satisfied with Open-E DSS V7 for many years but after our company and our requirements for R&D were growing faster and faster, we were looking for ways to increase our performance with proven products and relationships. Finally, Open-E released their new software JovianDSS with ZFS on Linux. With this, we were able to achieve non-performance degradation compression that allows us to store 60 to 80% more on each SAN. Since 90% of requests are running from the cache we achieved four times faster performance than with the old storage systems.“