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Editorial Type: Case Study     Date: 11-2015    Views: 1807      






Employee and customer engagement specialist Grass Roots reached out to HGST and VMware in order to create a high-performance and high-capacity infrastructure that can support its rapidly growing business

As a provider of employee and customer engagement solutions, Grass Roots inspires people to deliver outstanding results and, in turn, boosts performance for its clients. Four specialist divisions operate globally: Employee Solutions, Customer Engagement, Promotions and Incentives, and Meetings and Events. Consistently listed as one of The Sunday Times' 100 Best Companies to Work For in the UK, Grass Roots has been working with the world's leading brands for more than 30 years.

Due to the rapid growth of online services such as sales channel incentives, customer loyalty programs and charity fundraisers, Grass Roots had outgrown their 3-year old Storage Area Network (SAN). With a continuously increasing volume of online business, the company needed a way to scale efficiently without having to purchase more performance and capacity than is needed in the near-term.

Like many companies "born on the Internet," Grass Roots' business of enabling customer campaigns, promotional activities and events, as well as employee retention and programs, is based on a sophisticated set of Microsoft SQL Server technologies. A single SAN was sufficient during its early years, but with business growth it quickly became clear that the architecture could no longer support the company's increasing needs. Grass Roots began investigating its options and noted key considerations, including the following:

1. Adding capacity to the SAN would not address response time and user growth performance issues.
2. Upgrading the SAN to achieve necessary IOPS was prohibitively expensive.
3. Even with multi-pathing software, the SAN represented a single point of failure.
4. A rebuild of the SAN from a drive or RAID group failure required storage administrator resources and a lengthy process to get back online, reducing productivity and limiting employees and users from accessing needed tools.

Grass Roots reached out to both HGST and VMware to evaluate the latest Virtual SAN solution, featuring HGST's Ultrastar SN150 NVM Express compliant Flash and HelioSeal helium hard drives, to create a high-performance and high-capacity infrastructure that can support its rapidly growing business.

IDENTIFYING PERFORMANCE GAPS
In order to determine the best solution for their challenges, Grass Roots needed to learn more about its application server workloads. Per recommendation from the HGST team, Grass Roots ran HGST Profiler to gain valuable insights on current reads, writes, throughput and cache hits/misses. Completely non-disruptive to the system and with a simple-to-use GUI, the Grass Roots team was able to run Profiler on working servers and intelligently record data access patterns over several days.

The results were insightful. Grass Roots was experiencing over 90% read hits, but was only getting 6,000 IOPS out of the SAN. Grass Roots considered Flash devices with a stand-alone caching solution, but with the help of the VMware team, they determined Virtual SAN (VSAN) to be a superior solution as it enables caching, scale-out capacity, high resiliency and a broad feature set.

VSAN ENABLES MODULAR STORAGE
VSAN is a software-defined storage architecture that delivers high-performance, scale-out storage optimised for vSphere virtual infrastructure. It has built-in policies for RAID protection, snapshots and clones. It can also leverage vSphere Data Protection and vSphere Replication for backup and disaster recovery. In essence, VMware is moving storage management functionality out of high-end storage arrays and into vSphere software to allow enterprises to build their own storage systems from components like HGST SSDs and HDDs. To ensure data protection, VMware requires each participating storage node to operate its drives either in pass-through mode (with the VSAN software ensuring data protection) or in RAID-0 mode, effectively creating a server-side SAN alternative.

The latest generation of VSAN, called VSAN 6.0, operates in two modes. The first mode enables a hybrid storage configuration, optimising capacity and performance with one SSD and up to seven HDDs in a disk group. In this scenario, Flash is used as a read cache. VMware states that the hybrid VSAN can deliver 40k IOPS/server. The second option is all-Flash, with SSDs used for both caching and capacity. Here, VMware states the VSAN can deliver 90k IOPS/server with two tiers of SSDs-a write cache utilising high-endurance SSDs and a persistent data tier with high read performance utilising cost-effective, read-intensive SSDs.



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