END USER INSIGHT
WE CAN ACHIEVE
THE SAME
HIGH-LEVEL
PERFORMANCE
OF LOCAL NVME
DEVICES OVER
CENTRALISED,
REDUNDANT
NETWORKED
STORAGE.
extracting information from their data,”
said Lior Gal, Excelero Co-founder and
CEO. “We are extremely proud that
Excelero’s NVMesh is exceeding the
requirements of Bezeq’s data warehouse
and enabling the company to run its
day-to-day operations with an important
competitive edge.”
Intelligent Data Centres spoke to Igal
Muginstein, Storage and Backup Team
Manager at Bezeq, to find out more
about the solution and its benefits.
Can you provide some
background on Bezeq and
its company objectives?
Bezeq is Israel’s leading
telecommunications service provider.
Established in 1984, the company
has led Israel into the new era of
telecommunications, based on the most
advanced technologies and services.
Bezeq fixed-line offers domestic services
including Internet infrastructure services,
basic telephony, transmission and data
communications as well as cloud and
digital services.
The fixed line infrastructure comprises
an NGN (Next Generation Network) –
FTTC (Fiber to the Curb) network – with
approximately 1.8 million access lines
and tens of thousands of fibre-optic lines,
allowing for the delivery of a full range of
value-added services.
www.intelligentdatacentres.com
Bezeq has installed more than 1.6 million
high-speed retail and wholesale broadband
lines and enables broadband high-speed
services, advanced IP telephony and
OTT TV services. Broadband services
over the NGN network can reach up to
100 Megabits per second and enable
consumers to enjoy the most advanced
telecommunications and content services.
What were the key challenges
Bezeq was looking to address
ahead of selecting Excelero?
We wanted the flexibility to expand the
storage layer of our DWH infrastructure.
We also wanted performance
improvement, to reduce our OPEX and
CAPEX, prevent lock into hardware vendor
and establish a new storage shared
layer for new applications with high
performance demands (instead of internal
devices without sharing and protection).
Why did you choose to work with
Excelero and why did you opt for
this specific solution?
The Excelero solution was the only
one we found to fit our performance
demands (at least 15GBytes/sec) based
on block storage. Excelero provided the
flexibility to choose the most suitable
and cost-effective commodity hardware
for Bezeq’s requirements, eliminating
vendor lock-in. The company also offered
collaboration with the local development
team and made adjustments to our OS
and DB platform.
How was the implementation
process – did you encounter
any challenges, if so, how were
these resolved?
The main challenge was to adjust a
modern solution like NVMESH to a
relatively low OS version and Oracle
version. The Excelero team developed a
special version for those limitations (only
RAID 10 instead of RAID 5) that could be
configured with higher versions.
How far has the system future-
proofed the organisation?
The greater question is that of meeting
the company’s future needs and we
considered those when we designed the
system on one hand and when we scouted
for the right technology on the other hand.
We had already migrated our central
storage to all-flash array and applications
like DWH, which demand high performance,
will be established on Excelero
infrastructure (NVMe storage devices).
We can achieve the same high-level
performance of local NVMe devices over
centralised, redundant networked storage.
How do your customers benefit
from the solution?
We have established high performance
DRP for DWH (lower cost and same
performance as production environment)
as well as reduced run times by an average
of 30% compared to internal Fusion
IO devices or the legacy all-flash array
environment, and in some workloads,
reduced run times by up to 90%
Are there any trends or emerging
trends you expect to see in the
data storage space of which
infrastructure managers should
be aware?
I believe that modern data centre storage
infrastructure has to be based on all-flash
array for traditional loads and scalable
high-performance NVME-over fabric for
high performance applications.
The second trend we expect will be
object storage for unstructured data and
backup silos.
New NAS solutions have to combine high
performance and collaboration needs (we
implemented CTERA solution – software
with flash devices and Internet access to
portal with object storage).
A combination of storage and backup
products for CDP demands, instant
recovery and WORM solutions (software
with object storage)
In summary, what are the key
benefits of the solution?
High performance, cost-savings, simplicity
and scalability, and eliminating hardware
vendor lock-in. ◊
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