New Customer for French Start-Up Seanodes: Aenigma

Seanodes announced that cloud services provider Aenigma has developed a new multi-tiered storage infrastructure backed by Exanodes software to increase the reliability and performance of its High Availability Application Hosting Platform for as little as one-twentieth the cost of a similarly configured Fibre Channel SAN.

Delivering Software as a Service Aenigma provides an alternative to on-premise software development offering all the benefits and advantages of high availability and enterprise-grade business tools such as Microsoft Project Server, Office Sharepoint Server and Exchange Server on demand, at a competitive price. As a member of the VMware Service Provider Program Aenigma provides companies with on-demand Virtual Infrastructure, which can support any operating system, Windows or Linux and any compatible software stack they need. This ‘pay as you go’ model reduces clients’ operational and capital expenses, improves access to the latest business applications and eliminates the security risks inherent in collaboration between third parties.

The company has chosen Exanodes to serve as an all-around solution that provides Aenigma with both shared internal storage as well as external storage through iSCSI arrays. The versatility of Exanodes allows Aenigma to provide multiple storage tiers as part of its network architecture to improve the reliability and performance of the system by separating data by its value to enable high performance computing on one level with non-persistent data stored to another.

The solution, featuring VMWare ESX Dual Quad Core Servers with more than 10 virtual machines per server and several 1 TB disks embedded in the multiple storage servers as if they were a powerful shared storage pool, has been tested against a leading FC-SAN offering with the Exanodes system showing high reliability and robust performance between a tenth and a twentieth of the price of the box. Exanodes delivers on its ability to provide cost-correct capacity expansion capabilities while eliminating the need for traditional external RAID storage and its associated costs.

“Our Application Hosting Platform is designed to bring enterprise-class business tools to companies that may not have the means to do so in-house but still need access to critical applications,” said Geoff Wiener, Managing Director of Aenigma. “By renting time on the platform to run these applications, organizations benefit from a shared pool of computing resources and software that reduces costs and complexities they might otherwise face. Likewise, Seanodes pools storage resources to provide us with a high-performance clustered storage system that is economical and easy to manage – a perfect complement to our network infrastructure.”

Because access to customer data is a critical component to Aenigma’s business model, the company is building a ‘dual-site’ data center – duplicating the entire infrastructure – to answer customer needs. Exanodes clusters are deployed at each site to ensure the best performance, availability and integrity of Aenigma’s customer data in close proximity to the customer Virtual Machines. The data is then replicated between sites onto local Exanodes clusters for rapid recovery in the (unlikely) event of a single site failure. Maintaining multiple copies of critical customer data at each site and between sites ensures that Recovery Time and Recovery Point Objectives and SLAs can always be met.

“Aenigma needed a solution that enabled them to provide the utmost in data protection without incurring significant infrastructure costs that would effectively eliminate their ability to provide hosted applications at a cost-correct price,” said Frank Gana, Business Development Director at Seanodes. “What we were able to provide them with was the ability to leverage underutilized disks of ESX servers in conjunction with external iSCSI arrays built out of commoditized severs to receive a high level of reliability, efficiency and performance at a fraction of the price of FC-SAN products. By using the storage capacity of commoditized servers with cost-correct external storage, we have developed an ideal solution for Hosted Services infrastructures.”