IT Firm Boosts Storage Performance Tenfold,
Trims Costs with Software-Defined Storage
Overview
Customer: ClearPointe
Customer Website: www.clearpointe.com
Customer Size: 75 employees
Country or Region: United States
Industry: Professional services—IT services
Customer Profile
ClearPointe provides system design and managed IT services to organizations worldwide. Based in Little Rock, Arkansas, the company is a Gold-level member of the Microsoft Partner Network.
Business Situation
To accommodate new business needs and business growth, ClearPointe sought more cost-effective storage performance and scalability than its storage area network (SAN) could provide.
Solution
ClearPointe replaced its SAN with a software-defined storage solution based on the Storage Spaces feature in Windows Server 2012 R2.
Benefits
Increase storage performance by factor
of ten
Dramatically boost storage scalability Reduce storage costs by factor of six Eliminate 20 to 30 hours of storage
troubleshooting time each month
Double storage reliability
“By using Storage Spaces, we’re getting storage
performance of 450,000 IOPS and roughly a gigabyte
per second in throughput—more than 20 times the
IOPS and four times the throughput of our SAN.”
Daniel Weissenborn, Solution Architect, ClearPointe
Hundreds of companies around the world entrust the health of
their Microsoft server applications to ClearPointe, a managed IT
services provider. To break free from the limitations of its
Situation
From its network operations center (NOC) in Little Rock, Arkansas and its Dallas, Texas–based management cloud, ClearPointe maintains business-critical Microsoft applications, network infrastructure, and directory services for organizations globally. ClearPointe uses the Windows Server 2012 R2 operating system, Microsoft System Center 2012 R2, and Microsoft Azure to deliver a financial penalty-backed application uptime service-level agreement that guarantees reliable operation of all managed servers and applications and rapid NOC response times. The backbone of ClearPointe’s NOC is a hybrid management cloud based in Dallas, Texas. This management cloud uses the latest System Center technologies in both on-premises and off-premises deployment models. Microsoft System Center 2012 R2 Operations Manager is used to manage both customer servers and the applications running on them. “We firmly believe that Microsoft makes the best monitoring and management technologies,” says Daniel Weissenborn, Solution Architect at ClearPointe.
Historically, ClearPointe used a single instance of Operations Manager to monitor servers and applications for all of its customers. However, as its customer base grew, the single instance grew unwieldy, and ClearPointe decided to re-architect its Operations Manager infrastructure to take advantage of Microsoft Azure, the Microsoft cloud environment for building and hosting applications in Microsoft datacenters. It created customer-specific Operations Manager instances running in individual Azure Virtual Machines and used Microsoft System Center 2012 R2 Service Manager to coordinate and manage the hundreds of Operations Manager instances. “Distributed Operations Manager behind Service Manager, combined with our proprietary automation, allows us to multiply the talents of our 75 staff members,” Weissenborn says.
However, Service Manager performed slowly with ClearPointe’s existing storage area network (SAN) storage infrastructure. Beyond the need for Service Manager to perform well, ClearPointe wanted a more responsive and cost-effective storage infrastructure across its entire business. “Performance scalability is important for all our applications so that we can increase the number of customer servers we manage and the amount of automation we can apply without having to re-architect,” Weissenborn says.
A new SAN could solve the performance and scalability issues but at a tremendous cost. “We were given a budget of [US]$300,000 for a new storage
infrastructure, but a new SAN would cost $370,000, not to mention tens of thousands of dollars more for new network and backup infrastructure, and the other elements we wanted to implement” Weissenborn says. “We had to find a better way.”
Solution
ClearPointe had already deployed the Windows Server 2012 R2 operating system, which features a host of software-based storage innovations. One of these is Storage Spaces, a set of features used to create virtualized storage pools from physical disks for enabling flexible, high-performance storage using industry-standard servers.
Storage tiering is another feature
supported by Windows Server 2012 R2 that allows customers to gain both high-performance and high-capacity storage by combining high-performance solid-state drives (SSDs) and low-cost, high-capacity hard disk drives (HDDs) in a single storage solution. Storage tiering increases the performance of the most used (“hot”) data by moving it to SSDs without sacrificing the ability to store large quantities of data on inexpensive HDDs.
“The storage
improvements in
Windows Server 2012 R2
were very enticing,
especially from a price
perspective.”
In addition, a Hyper-V host can store virtual machine configuration files, virtual hard drives, and snapshots in file shares over the Server Message Block 3.0 (SMB3) protocol (Hyper-V over SMB3).
“The storage improvements in Windows Server 2012 R2 were very enticing, especially from a price perspective,” Weissenborn says. “We basically got all these capabilities for free since we already licensed the operating system.”
However, many of the company’s longtime enterprise design engineers were leery of replacing the tried-and-true SANs with the software-based storage approach. Weissenborn knew that he would have to show rather than tell his colleagues what was possible with what the industry called software-defined or virtualized storage. With the help of the local Microsoft account team, Weissenborn set up a small test storage environment running Windows Server 2012 R2 in a ClearPointe lab. For eight months, this test environment worked flawlessly, demonstrating the needed uptime without high maintenance needs. This demonstration served as a benchmark of the technologies’ ability to perform under load for an extended period of time and satisfied the engineering team’s reliability concerns. Now it was just a matter of scaling the design to meet production performance requirements. While the test was in progress,
Weissenborn obtained quotes on a new SAN in case the team voted to continue with the status quo. The figures that came back confirmed his fears: that ClearPointe would not be able to afford a SAN that performed at the level it needed, even if it wanted one. “The cost of a high-quality SAN would be six times what a Storage Spaces approach would be, and features such as tiering would be tens of thousands of dollars extra,” Weissenborn says.
The engineers were happy. The financial people were happy. It was full steam ahead with a Storage Spaces storage
infrastructure. ClearPointe proceeded to build a production software-defined storage infrastructure that consists of three 4U RAID Inc. enclosures with 60 storage drive bays in each. The three storage enclosures give ClearPointe fault tolerance: If one enclosure fails, the other two remain online for uninterrupted operation. “With the Storage Spaces solution we have much higher storage density than we’d have with a classic SAN—180 drives in a 12U space,” Weissenborn says.
Inside the RAID Inc. enclosures, ClearPointe has a mixture of 7,200-RPM hard drives and high-speed solid-state drives. It uses storage tiering to move less-frequently used files to the slower hard drives and more-frequently accessed files to the SSDs. To access this scalable and flexible bank of storage, ClearPointe created a set of industry-standard scale-out file services servers housed in two Dell PowerEdge R720 2U rack server chassis. Using an additional two Dell R720s as Hyper-V servers, ClearPointe created virtual machines that use the storage on the scale-out file server. These virtual machine are rolled into the Service Manager installation for production NOC use. All elements communicate over the SMB 3.0 protocol using Hyper-V over SMB3 with RDMA (remote direct memory access)-capable network interface cards (NICs).
“When our engineering guys saw Storage Spaces in action they were floored,” Weissenborn says. “It is the fastest virtualized storage platform they’d ever seen.”
For backup, ClearPointe deployed a Dell PowerEdge R620 rack server attached to a half-populated RAID Inc. EBOD (90 TB raw) at its primary datacenter to roll up backup solutions there. It also deployed a secondary Dell PowerEdge R620 with the
“The cost of a
high-quality SAN would be six
times what a Storage
Spaces approach would
be, and features such as
tiering would be tens of
thousands of dollars
extra.”
same half-populated EBOD in Little Rock, which serves as an offsite sync for backups in the management cloud. This Little Rock sync takes data and pushes it up to Azure to meet compliance requirements for SSAE-16 (Statement on Standards for Attestation Engagements). Additionally, the half-populated disk chassis gives ClearPointe plenty of backup scalability.
ClearPointe manages its Storage Spaces infrastructure with the Windows PowerShell command line interface and scripting language, another tool that ClearPointe already uses for management. This streamlines and replaces resource-intensive management of a proprietary SAN
operating system.
Benefits
By replacing its SAN infrastructure with a Storage Spaces storage solution,
ClearPointe increased storage performance by a factor of ten, gained much greater storage scalability, and reduced storage costs by a factor of six. It has also eliminated 20 to 30 hours of SAN management work each month and doubled its storage infrastructure redundancy.
Increase Storage Performance by Factor of Ten, Dramatically Increase Storage Scalability
With the Storage Spaces infrastructure in place, ClearPointe’s Service Manager response times went from 10 to 15 seconds to 1 to 3 seconds. “By using Storage Spaces, we’re getting storage performance of 450,000 IOPS and roughly a gigabyte per second in throughput—more than 20 times the IOPS and four times the throughput of our SAN,” Weissenborn says.
What’s even more exciting for ClearPointe is the fact that it still has plenty of growing room. It has only populated 30 percent of its three storage enclosures, which gives it generous room to expand both storage capacity and performance. “With 60 drives in one 4U enclosure, we have nearly three
times the drive capacity that we’d have had with a 24-drive SAN,” Weissenborn says. “Being able to scale our Storage Spaces infrastructure to three times its current size in the same enclosure gives us the flexibility we need. We’re growing and getting new customers all the time.”
Reduce Storage Costs by Factor of Six
ClearPointe reduced its capital storage costs from $370,000 for a new SAN to just $60,000 for Storage Spaces storage hardware. In addition to the cost of the SAN, ClearPointe would have had to make additional investments to replace
networking, backup solutions, and virtualization hosts.
“With our $300,000 budget, we would have had to forgo everything but the SAN and settle for something without SSD,” Weissenborn says. “By using Storage Spaces, we got everything we wanted for a fraction of the cost. Additionally, we were able to take the rest of our budget and introduce new Hyper-V servers and 10-gigabit networking, and completely replace our cross-site backup solution. We essentially have a new private cloud and came in 10 percent under budget. We got everything we wanted in terms of
performance, features, and scalability while staying under budget. That is the holy grail of IT right there.”
Eliminate 20 to 30 Hours of Storage Problem-Solving Each Month
With its SAN environment, ClearPointe engineers spent 20 to 30 hours a month troubleshooting problems—nearly all after business hours. By contrast, “We spend zero time managing our Storage Spaces solution,” Weissenborn says. “With our System Center management pack, we can instrument and automate everything, which makes our storage infrastructure far more reliable and lets our on-call engineers get more sleep.”
Double Storage Reliability
“We got everything we
wanted in terms of
performance, features,
and scalability while
staying under budget.
That is the holy grail of
IT right there.”
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In fact, ClearPointe has doubled the redundancy of its storage infrastructure by switching to a Storage Spaces model. It has redundancy across chassis, controllers, RDMA-capable NICs, and servers, none of which it had previously. “If any element in our Storage Spaces infrastructure fails or loses power, our storage stays online,” says Weissenborn. “This means our customers’ servers and our business stay online. There’s no price you can put on that.”
Transform the Datacenter
The hybrid cloud from Microsoft transforms the datacenter by extending existing investments in skills and technology with public cloud services and a common set of management tools. With an on-premises infrastructure connected to the Microsoft Azure platform, you can deliver services faster and scale up or down quickly to meet changing needs.
For more information about transforming the datacenter, go to:
www.microsoft.com/en-us/server-cloud/cloud-os/modern-data-center.aspx
For More Information
For more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers in the United States and Canada who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To accessinformation using the World Wide Web, go to:
www.microsoft.com
For more information about ClearPointe products and services, visit the website at:
www.clearpointe.com
This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.
Document published August 2014
Software and Services
Microsoft Server Product Portfolio
− Windows Server 2012 R2 Datacenter − Microsoft System Center 2012 R2
Technologies
− Hyper-V − Storage Spaces
Hardware
RAID Inc. 4U drive enclosures
