Swedish City Network Using Gluster

Gluster announced City Network Hosting, provider of hosting services, is using its storage solution for the company’s cloud services platform, City Cloud.

Recently launched after more than 15 months in beta, City Cloud is a service used by more than 500 Swedish companies and is the first infrastructure as a service (IaaS) platform in Sweden. City Network chose Gluster cloud storage for its City Cloud offering due to its ability to provide the scalability and reliability needed to meet the company’s growing business demands without affecting performance.

"We believe our business as a whole will, to a large extent, be judged on performance, as our leading cloud solutions continue to grow. Our customers expect extreme performance from their applications," said Johan Christenson, chairman of City Network. "We need a storage solution like Gluster that delivers reliability and can scale on-demand without hindering the quality of performance. Additionally, with Gluster we didn’t need to make the sacrifice of performance in order to make it fit our budget. There are real savings in the fact that you can combine off-the-shelf hardware, while at the same time creating a powerhouse of reliability, scalability and performance."

As City Cloud continues to grow, it relies on the elastic scaling capabilities of storage. This reliance makes it necessary for storage to have growth capacity, but most importantly to never sacrifice performance as that growth kicks in. Customer applications run in virtual machines (VMs) that are hosted on blade servers with multi-tenant access to the Gluster storage deployment. This large scale VM environment requires storage that fits in a virtualized data center. In the event of a blade failure, VMs can migrate to a new blade with continued access to the data. City Cloud uses Gluster’s file replication capabilities to ensure high availability of the data. VMs and storage are provisioned dynamically and enable seamless growth.

Additionally, City Network needed a solution that integrated with Enomaly Elastic Computing to deliver performance at peak times, specifically by eliminating I/O bottlenecks that were experienced with previous storage systems. Because of the success City Cloud is experiencing with Gluster, City Network is planning to roll out Gluster for all of its services – cloud, email, shared hosting, etc.

"As the demand for cloud services continues to increase, service providers face some of the most difficult challenges ensuring their storage environment is dependable and has the ability to survive hardware failures," said AB Periasamy, co-founder and CTO of Gluster. "Gluster is providing City Network with the reliable, highly scalable cloud storage it needs to meet its customer demands. We look forward to the success of City Cloud and watching City Network expand its deployment of Gluster into other areas of the company."