Intelligent Data Centres Issue 11 | Page 49

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. ◊ Issue 11 49