UK Kualo Web Hosting Adopts StorPool

Kualo Web Hosting is a privately-owned company headquartered in London, UK.

It serves tens of thousands of clients across the globe and provide fast, reliable and competitively priced web hosting services including shared web hosting, cloud and dedicated servers, domain name registration and reseller solutions.

Pain Points
Finding a suitable storage solution for their cloud hosting offering is the single most frustrating obstacle that Kualo has had to overcome to date. Their experience started with CA AppLogic but the storage speed and capacity limitations have been a repeating headache. They also looked at enterprise solutions which had the potential to solve these problems, but were prohibitively expensive.

Over the years Kualo deployed numerous software solutions – Nexenta, FreeNAS and OpenFiler, but in all cases they had rapidly encountered scalability issues, performance problems or both. Deploying StorPool allowed Kualo to replace these various systems with a single solution that solved all storage problems.

Storage Solution
Kualo’s initial solution consisted of two deployments of three storage nodes each which have expanded since to provide both additional capacity and increased performance. Due to the minimal resource usage (CPU and RAM) of StorPool Ltd‘s software, Kualo has the ability to use the storage nodes for computation as well as for storage in a converged fashion. Their initial three-node deployments, consisting of both HDDs and SSDs, achieved data transfer rates of over 1GB/s at up to 85,000 IOPS, with latencies of 0.00136s. The solution takes advantage of redundant 10GbE network to provide redundancy and performance.

Why StorPool
Over the years, Kualo have developed four key criteria for selecting storage infrastructure: performance, redundancy, scalability and cost-effectiveness. StorPool Ltd delivered in all of these areas. With StorPool, Kualo managed to deploy a combination of older servers and new drives and achieved data throughput in a cost effective manner.

Results
Kualo chose StorPool’s month-to-month licensing model. Paying only for what they use made considerable up-front savings for Kualo. This combined with StorPool’s ability to run on relatively low specification hardware allowed Kualo to grow seamlessly. Now they can add servers as they need and can even redeploy existing servers with minimal hardware changes.

Other results that Kualo highlight are:

• No unplanned outages or performance issues – the technical and engineering teams no longer live in a permanent state of high alert;
• Scalability – Kualo will be using StorPool in other areas of their business, including storage solutions for shared hosting and their enterprise level managed hosting clients;
• Simplified infrastructure – StorPool has a relatively small resource footprint, which has allowed Kualo to migrate their internal company servers onto their StorPool data nodes to simplify their internal infrastructure and provide additional savings through consolidation;
• Decreased TCO – significant reduction in TCO due to the pay-as-you-grow
  licensing model. They don’t have to pay upfront for capacity they don’t need;
• Increased revenue – having full confidence in the storage system allows Kualo to push sales. They are refreshing their entire cloud server offering to facilitate further revenue growth;
• Time saving – Kualo no longer need to maintain multiple systems and deal with frequent intermittent issues. This frees their team to concentrate on more more important things;
• Downtime reduction – downtime has been eliminated since implementing StorPool.

“StorPool is the solution to storage performance and scalability problems that we’ve been battling with for years. It has delivered the performance and reliability our clients require at a viable cost, virtually eliminated the time our engineering team spends dealing with storage related problems and it provides us with access to a fantastic team who excel at what they do and always go the extra mile to exceed our expectations. StorPool’s technical team have been exceptional from day one. They facilitated our initial test deployment and went above and beyond to assist us with benchmarking. They are relentless in their quest to get the best possible performance from our deployments and frequently make optimisation suggestions to further improve our data throughput,” comments Craig Luke, operations director, Kualo..

“I would recommend StorPool without hesitation. If you require high performance, affordable storage that just works and is backed by a fantastic support team willing to go the extra mile, then look no further,” he added.

Case study