One of the key reasons for moving to a cloud-based infrastructure is to reduce costs. This is true whether you are building an in-house cloud or are a cloud provider looking to price your offerings competitively. Because storage makes up such a large part of the costs of any cloud-based infrastructure, it is an obvious place to look for reductions. System Solutions, Inc. (SSI), a King of Prussia, Pa.-based IT solutions provider, took that advice to heart in building MySecureCloud, a hosted infrastructure solution targeted at small and medium businesses (SMBs).
The Business Requirements
In creating MySecureCloud, SSI’s business plan was to host core business applications like file services, mail and mail archiving, and database services for SMB customers in North America, enabling these businesses to outsource their IT operations so they could focus their resources on building and managing their core businesses. Providing reliable application services for a rapidly growing stable of customers meant SSI had to meet certain cloud infrastructure requirements, including easy scalability, high availability, and high performance. To price its services aggressively, SSI also planned to leverage newer technologies in its cloud infrastructure to minimize storage and ongoing administrative operations.
Crafting the Cloud Infrastructure Solution
SSI selected Microsoft Hyper-V as its hypervisor platform, a choice the company believed would leverage its pre-existing Windows expertise and help keep licensing costs down for its cloud infrastructure. To support its scalability and availability requirements, it was clear that a networked storage architecture that supported shared storage would be required. During development of the cloud infrastructure, SSI used Hyper-V fixed disks to maximize the performance per disk spindle, but it noted an issue with storage capacity consumption. “Performance requirements were driving us to provision our storage in a way that resulted in a lot of wasted storage capacity, driving up our costs. We were looking for a solution that would allow us to deliver high performance but would use storage capacity much more efficiently,” said Scott Urofsky, SSI’s Chief Technology Officer. In effect, SSI wanted both high performance and thin provisioning at the same time without having to purchase expensive, enterprise-class arrays.
“We already had an FC SAN from Promise Technology in-house, and wanted to leverage that as we built out the MySecureCloud infrastructure,” continued Urofsky. “We had found Promise products to be reliable over time, and leveraging hardware we already owned would help keep our infrastructure costs down, particularly when you look at how equipment like this compares to enterprise-class arrays on a $/GB basis. But our SAN was lacking thin provisioning and scalable snapshot technology, two features we considered necessary for the MySecureCloud offering.” SSI began to look at options to add those capabilities in the most cost-effective way.
At first, Urofsky evaluated an appliance-based storage virtualization solution, but he found it would not really address SSI’s cost requirements. As he was researching additional options online, he discovered a pure software-based approach from Virsto Software that promised to increase the amount of throughput he could get on a per-spindle basis from his existing storage, while at the same time adding thin provisioning, scalable snapshots and cluster awareness. The cluster awareness was critical since SSI would be using Windows Server Failover Clusters to manage to its high availability objective, and the company needed full support for Live Migration as well as the ability to move virtual machines (VMs) individually without being limited to configurations that required one VM per LUN. What really piqued Urofsky’s interest in Virsto was the possibility of increasing the VM density SSI could support with a given storage configuration. Being able to support more VMs with a given storage configuration would have a positive impact on SSI’s revenues.
In-house benchmarks run in SSI’s lab proved Virsto’s claims, showing that Urofsky would increase his I/O performance by almost 3x using his existing storage hardware configuration. This performance was achieved with thin provisioned storage objects called Virsto vDisks, which look exactly like standard virtual hard drives (VHDs) to Hyper-V. Storage capacity consumption went down by more than 60 percent using this technology, with the end result being that SSI could support almost three times as many VMs as before on its storage infrastructure while providing the same performance.
“Virsto gave us the high performance with very efficient storage capacity consumption that we were looking for, allowing us to increase our supported VM density with our existing hardware,” continued Urofsky. “What we didn’t expect were some of the management advantages and administrative time savings that we obtained using Virsto’s virtual storage layer.” Virsto supported VHDs larger than 2TB in size and enabled high-performance backups of cluster-aware storage objects using Windows Volume Shadowcopy Services (VSS) and Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager (DPM).
Virsto’s solution deploys at the hypervisor level with a single software install in the parent partition of each Hyper-V Host, regardless of the number of supported VMs. Virsto establishes a virtual storage layer that works with any heterogeneous, block-based storage, and it supports storage objects that look like standard Hyper-V VHDs. The fact that Virsto vDisks were managed by System Center tools just like standard VHDs was important to SSI as well. “Virsto integrated very well with our Hyper-V environment, supporting familiar Windows management semantics and enabling the use of a lot of key Hyper-V features and tools like Quick Migration, Live Migration, VSS, DPM, Failover Clustering, Virtual Machine Manager, Operations Manager, and WMI,” added Urofsky. “The Virsto GUI is an MMC snap-in that fully supports WMI, giving us a lot of PowerShell options to save time on provisioning and other repetitive administrative tasks that we have to perform to keep our infrastructure humming along.”
The Bottom Line
Reducing the cost of storage infrastructure had the expected business impact. “We could price our services very aggressively while at the same time offering the management functionality – quick VM spin-up, high availability, snapshots, etc. – our customers needed,” Urofsky said. “We offer great value to our customers, making the decision to outsource their IT operations easier than ever before.”
Based on testing in the initial MySecureCloud test environment, SSI had scoped out a significantly larger storage configuration than it needed. In SSI’s case, the use of Virsto in the cloud infrastructure reduced storage infrastructure costs by almost 40 percent while still meeting those requirements. Appliance-based solutions with integrated solid state disk (SSD) would have enabled SSI to meet performance requirements as well, but not nearly as cost-effectively as the pure software-based solution deployed in production.
With MySecureCloud less than a year old, SSI has been very pleased with the business it has generated. Its appeal and functional capabilities have met market demand, customer count has grown quickly, and SSI will soon be increasing its abilities to accommodate additional customers. “As our business grows and we build out our infrastructure, keeping Virsto in the mix will clearly save us and our customers a lot of money,” Urofsky concluded.
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