US Internet Service Provider Deploys Qsan

Company Biography
By enabling businesses to communicate with their customers and each other, and local and states governments to serve citizens. the MD-based public utility provides telephony, high speed Internet and data connectivity services, website and managed server hosting, and collocation data-center services. Relying on a 4Tb/s fiber backbone, the enterprise prides itself on the high-availability of its many services, achieving this goal, in part, by operating a redundant second datacenter.

Us Internet Service Provider Deploy Qsan

Challenge
Providing businesses and governments with critical functionality like voice and Internet services demands reliable, high-speed storage. This Internet service provider (ISP) operates a variety of applications and databases like MS SQL server, MySQL, and Postscript databases in VMs to store customer data records and track customer usage for billing. Moreover, business intelligence is applied to its data streams, furthering the need for fast storage. For example, it delivers intelligent call routing to determine the optimal paths for the best rates for local, long-distance, and international calls. The enterprise also applies sophisticated analytics to detect fraud and prevent costly hacking.

“Our systems scan thousands of calls daily to determine if there’s suspicious activity that could compromise our customers’ communications,” said the CIO. “We need storage with very high throughput to analyze torrents of data and look for patterns that indicate malicious behaviors.”

However, it was relying on storage solutions with traditional spinning disks. “Our spindle-based SAN couldn’t deliver the I/O performance that we required going forward. It was also at the end of its lifecycle when disks start to fail. We needed a robust storage upgrade at both of our datacenters.”

Solution:

The QSAN AFAs was installed into similar environments at its 2 datacenters. Each 2U device was initially provisioned with 12×1.9TB SSDs and then fully populated with 26 SSDs, providing 49TB of capacity. Each array houses 22TB of data. The QSAN platforms have redundant 10Gb iSCSI links to a pair of Juniper Ex4550 switches at the data centers. The switches at each site connect to HP Proliant DL 360 servers through 10GbE connections. Additionally, the switches each site connect to a server running the DataCore SANsymphony-V storage virtualization solution.

Benefits
The QSAN platforms with the flash drives provide greater throughput over the enterprise’s legacy spinning disks, resulting in better and more consistent performance. Latency dropped from 18–20ms on average on the spindles to sub-5ms on the AFA platforms.

“We now can handle large volumes of requests and data more consistently,” said the CIO. “Additionally, our applications are more responsive as wait times are much reduced. There’s simply no comparison between our legacy spinning disks and our flash drives.”

This ISP protects its business information by replicating data between its 2 QSAN platforms, and redundant links further ensure availability. The chassis also provides safeguards such as dual-active controllers, maximizing utilization of system resources. With multiple interfaces into the environment, each controller can assume all services if the other fails.

This ISP also takes data protection a step further by using RAID 5EE technology on its QSAN systems. RAID 5EE ensures the recovery of all data should 1 or 2 disks fail, it also speeds rebuilds by writing to spare areas reserved on each disk. Writes are therefore to all the drives, eliminating a traditional RAID bottleneck.

As an added benefit, QSAN AFAs reduce energy consumption and produce less heat than traditional storage systems, improving efficiencies and lowering costs.

“QSAN made our enhanced storage architecture possible,” explained by the CIO. “We always knew that we’d upgrade to all flash storage someday, and QSAN made the economics feasible.”

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