Stock Photo Agency Alamy Sets Up iSCSI Solution

Open-E, Inc. introduced a customer case study from the photographic industry featuring the Open-E DSS V7 storage software.

Alamy Ltd is an online photo agency for stock photos, videos and live news with over 30,000 individual photographers and 600 picture agencies registered worldwide that contribute to the image database.

Every day about 30,000 new pictures are added to their collection and still their website remains one of the fastest in the market.

Their main storage challenge was that all hardware was approaching EOL (end of life). Their head office operations were supported by a number of various servers, many of them virtualized over the last five years. The infrastructure consisted of a single Open-E DSS V6 license that provided iSCSI storage for two ESXi servers. The third ESXi server hosted a virtualized Exchange server. As the company discovered that the hardware was approaching EOL they decided for a new storage solution. Also, despite multiple dedicated disk arrays, performance issues with Exchange started to occur. Unfortunately VMware’s licensing requirements for live migration (vCenter) were beyond Alamy’s budget, as well as achieving true redundancy of shared storage by means of traditional SAN solutions.

That’s why Alamy’s IT Team decided for a solution that leverages a HA hypervisor platform, Hyper-V 2012 clustering, and Open-E DSS V7 with Active-Active iSCSI Failover for HA iSCSI storage. They created a test system with four existing test-lab servers. Then the system was evaluated with various configuration options and finally stress-tested. All this has been performed in order to make sure the new environment performs well and that the Open-E and Hyper-V failover works properly. As for the new hardware, Alamy used 2 x Dell PowerEdge R620 servers, each with two 10 core processors and 128GB RAM as Hyper-V servers, and two Dell PowerEdge R720XD servers, each with twelve 2TB SATA drives as Open-E servers. Then, the existing servers were migrated from ESX to Hyper-V.

Mark Jones, network administrator, Alamy, said: “The active-active iSCSI replication in Open-E DSS V7 provides load-balancing of storage, redundancy against hardware failure, and the ability to install hardware and OS updates without VM downtime which were the strongest arguments for our decision. Additionally, our Exchange performance issues have completely disappeared. Migrating from ESX to Hyper-V means that both failover clustering and live migration are supported without a large investment in licenses. With MPIO on Open-E DSS V7 and NIC bonding with MPIO on Hyper-V, even the failure of a NIC causes no downtime. An actual hardware failure demonstrated that the project goal of resilience had been achieved.“