The Hitachi Unified Storage VM data storage platform,
due to its high performance, fast response times, and wide
array of innovative services, has successfully solved every
task placed before the company’s IT infrastructure. SUCCESS STORY
Oleg Konovalov
Director of Oncloud.ru
Onlanta Ltd.
Computing Provider Onlanta Boosts Cloud Services
With Hitachi Solutions
Onlanta, a cloud-based computing provider based in Russia,
found it needed to upgrade its data storage system, which was
composed of equipment from multiple vendors. With a growing
number of customers and the ever-expanding spectrum of
business activities being carried out in the cloud, the company
required a flexible, innovative solution. It needed the capability to
distribute resource volumes based on real-time demand.
Adding Hitachi Unified Storage VM to the existing data
storage infrastructure permitted the company to improve the
performance of all of its infrastructure components through
the use of virtualization technology. The scalability of the HDS
solution allowed Onlanta to quickly adapt to any client demand.
Its tiered storage mechanism facilitated the optimization of
outlays on processing and data storage, as well as reduced the
overall footprint of the data storage system.
About Onlanta
Onlanta offers a wide array of IT
outsourcing services, including IT infrastructure support, data system support,
cloud computing, data security and application management services. OnCloud.
ru provides cloud-based services using,
primarily, VMware programming solutions.
It provides both IT infrastructure and
software-as-a-service services in the
cloud, as well as hosting and virtualization
of corporate applications. Company
hardware resources are concentrated in
several partner data centers.
Onlanta is part of the LANIT group of
companies. The company’s head office
is located in Moscow, and the company
has representative offices in Nizhnii
Novgorod, Penza, Tver and Barnaul.
Onlanta’s partner network has representation in every region of Russia. Businesses
from the financial and banking, petroleum
Onlanta Ltd.
INDUSTRY
IT Outsourcing
SOLUTION
Virtualization, Flash, Cloud
Hardware
Hitachi Unified Storage VM, Hitachi
Accelerated Flash
SOFTWARE
Hitachi Dynamic Link Manager, Hitachi Thin
Image, Hitachi Replication Manager
Benefits at a Glance
■■
Increased performance by 7-8 times,
per Onlanta customers.
■■
Performed operations 10 times faster.
■■
Optimized storage expenditures by 20%.
■■
■■
Reduced electricity and cooling
expenses by 50%.
Reduced footprint by 50%.
SUCCESS STORY
and energy, telecommunications and networking, transport, retail, manufacturing and
service industries as well as state institutions
are among the company’s clients.
The company’s cloud-based computing
services entail the leasing of data storage
systems and high-performance servers
to clients. They require that data storage systems be high performing, reliable
and scalable, as a client may request its
cloud space be expanded or reduced at
any moment, depending on its operating
requirements.
The Challenges: New
Demands, New Infrastructure
By 2013, the company had become one of
the acknowledged leaders of the Russian
cloud computing services market, and as
the company’s large client portfolio grew,
so did its data storage demands. Soon the
company needed to upgrade its IT infrastructure to deliver the required volumes
and performance with its data storage systems. It needed to meet established service
level agreements (SLAs) at an acceptable
price-to-performance ratio, as well as sufficient flexibility under conditions of quickly
changing client demand.
At the start of the project, the company
was using equipment from various manufacturers. Most of the equipment included
inexpensive devices that did not possess the necessary flexibility to distribute
resources and required significant outlays to
operate and support.
Thus, the goals of the upgrade were to:
■■
■■
■■
Expand the volume and improve the performance of the data storage system to
provide for current client demands.
Ensure solution reliability and fault tolerance in accordance with existing SLAs (in
particular, in terms of downtime).
Quickly scale storage volume distribution
systems.
“One of Onlanta’s primary business lines
is cloud services, primarily leasing computing resources to end users,” explains
Oleg Konovalov, director of Oncloud.ru at
Onlanta. “Distributing a specific storage
space to each client is a rather difficult task,
as the decision must be reliable and the
service must always be operational with
The Onlanta company has solved its resource deficit
by obtaining a scalable system [HUS VM] capable of
providing for its present and future
Oleg Konovalov
business needs. Director of Oncloud.ru
Onlanta Ltd.
no downtime. The Hitachi Unified Storage
VM data storage platform, due to its high
performance, fast response times, and wide
array of innovative services, has successfully
solved every task placed before the company’s IT infrastructure,” he adds.
The Solution: A Platform
That Handles a Wide Array
of Operations
Onlanta IT specialists
Hitachi
decided against completely
Accelerated
replacing the company’s
Flash
existing equipment. They
LEARN MORE
chose instead to supplement it with a modern data
storage complex. They
could migrate a portion of critical resources
to the new complex, which would also facilitate virtualization to improve coordination
and response times for all systems. After an
analysis of the entire data storage system
market, they chose a solution comprising
Hitachi Unified Storage VM (HUS VM) with
Hitachi Accelerated Flash (HAF) modules.
HUS VM is an entry enterprise platform in
the corporate-class storage system line
capable of solving a wide spectrum of
business tasks. The scalable system allows
the company to manage all types of data
using various storage options, which gives
the system flexibility. At the same time, it
allows any cloud-based computer provider
to adapt to the growing client demands and
activities. Deep integration with VMware
solutions allowed the IT company to optimally utilize its existing resources.
One of the important features of HUS VM is
its ability to virtualize many other manufacturers’ data storage systems. Data migration
between systems occurs at high speed and
with minimal risk. This approach allows the
company to create a universal data storage
system platform without abandoning its old
infrastructure while reducing congestion
and improving management functions.
The entire array of software, including
Hitachi Dynamic Link Manager, Hitachi
Thin Image, Hitachi Replication Manager
and others, ensures storage reliability
and local data protection. The solution
ensures total access to data and functions
around-the-clock.
With the HUS VM is Hitachi Accelerated
Flash. Based on HDS’s innovative flash
technology, this performs twice as well as
traditional solid-state disks (SSDs) with
a significant reduction in downtime. HAF
modules, with a maximum of 3.2TB each,
have significantly improved the performance
of the internal and external storage pool,
which is 400TB in size.
Finally, HUS VM and HAF solutions help the
company achieve savings by reducing the
footprint of the facility by 50% and energy
demands by 50%, as well as enabling competitive pricing. Compared to other SSD
solutions, Hitachi Accelerated Flash modules
offer the best price-to-performance ratio.
Resources can be easily redistributed and
processing and storage expenses can
therefore be optimized due to the tiered
data storage functionality. The solution
allows automatic transfer of data between
different storage tiers, which are created by
disks with differing performance and capacity within a single, dynamic pool.
The Benefits: Increased
Performance, Flexibility
and Savings
The data storage system upgrade project
at Onlanta began in 2013 and is now in
wide-scale use. The project is under development: In 2015, the first upgrade was
installed using the solution and additional
equipment was purchased. HDS equipment
is located in one of the data centers leased
by the cloud-based computing provider.
Onlanta responds quickly to client demands.
At present, due to the increased performance, fault tolerance and scaling of the
HUS VM platform, it is far easier to satisfy
client demand. The company effectively
uses its current resources to meet its current
needs with minimal expenses for electricity
and tech support of the infrastructure.
The HUS VM solution with Hitachi Accelerated
Flash modules gave Onlanta the flexibility to
allocate storage resources and the ability to
completely distribute the loads of different
customers. The company actually pays less
for data storage system infrastructure though
it uses more resources.
The performance for virtual machines on the
new infrastructure has greatly increased.
Sequential read and write increased from
1-1.2GB/sec up to 5-6GB/sec on a typical
load profile and massive migrations of virtual machines. Plus, the average response
time for critical services was reduced from
8-10ms to 1-2ms. The overall performance
of the storage system has grown from
35,000 to 140,000 IOPS.
Onlanta’s customers have reported that
overall performance has increased by up to
7-8 times. They note that some operations
now perform up to 10 times faster.
It became easier to do system upgrades at
any required level of detail. Onlanta has solved
its resource deficit by obtaining a scalable
system capable of providing for its present
and future business needs.
The HUS VM solution with
Hitachi Accelerated Flash
modules gave Onlanta the
flexibility to allocate storage
resources and the ability to
completely distribute the
loads of different customers.
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SS-581-A DG November 2015