High Availability and Ease of Management Enables Cloud Service Provider to Benefit from Significant Savings and Meet Stringent SLAs
Pulsant, a leading UK provider of hybrid cloud services, has selected two InfiniBox storage arrays from INFINIDAT to deliver storage service excellence to its many customers throughout the UK. Pulsant benefits from enterprise-class performance, cost effectiveness and ease of management while its customers enjoy high levels of storage performance, availability and service reliability.
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The market for cloud computing services hotly contends. Service providers have to fulfil stringent service level agreements (SLAs), or their customers will take their business elsewhere. One of Pulsant’s most strategic offerings is its cloud storage service, especially in light of the growing demand amongst mid-tier and enterprise customers to outsource some or all of their storage infrastructure. Pulsant was looking for an alternative storage solution to run alongside and eventually replace its more traditional tier-1 storage-based system. The company wanted to provide a more cost-effective service to position itself more competitively while retaining the high service quality and availability that its customers were accustomed to and required.
Pulsant selected InfiniBox storage arrays from INFINIDAT to store a wide range of customer data. The systems are used as shared devices to service customer infrastructures as part of Pulsant’s storage services as well as larger shared environments including Pulsant’s Enterprise Cloud platform, a VMware-based multi-tenant infrastructure platform housing several hundred customers.
Before selecting INFINIDAT, Pulsant carried out a thorough TCO analysis, which included modelling the cost of a service for customers, the results of which were the largest contributing factor in the purchasing decision. In addition to the low TCO, the Pulsant team was impressed by INFINIDAT’s enterprise-class functionality. The InfiniBox arrays offer a feature set which replicates that of more expensive systems but reduces complexity and cost by deploying commodity style hardware, intelligent disk utilisation techniques and effective SSD and memory caching layers for “hot” data sets. INFINIDAT’s innovative design enables ease of operation, while its low power and cooling requirements have resulted in cost savings, ultimately delivering more for less than other storage arrays.
The installation process was quick and easy with the systems being in production within three months from the start of the initial proof of concept testing. The INFINIDAT team was involved at all times, and Pulsant was impressed by the level of communication, depth of technical knowledge and project management skills. Since installing the solution, Pulsant enjoys an average latency of sub-1ms across a highly diverse set of customer workloads and has been able to apply software updates real-time with no disruption of service. In addition to these key customer benefits, Pulsant’s operations team enjoys the simplicity of management and the lack of need to tune the arrays as these automatically and intelligently adapt to changing workloads and data access requirements.
“Our InfiniBox systems provide an excellent balance between ease of operation, enterprise-class features, availability, performance and cost. As such, the solution is exactly what we were looking for”, said Russel Ridgley, head of cloud services, Pulsant. “The low TCO allows us to position ourselves aggressively from a commercial point of view. The flawless reliability of the system means we can meet our strict SLAs with our customers. And the management simplicity helps us to easily service a large number of very different customers and maintain several hundred directly connected devices and volumes without any problems.”
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