StorPool is the solution to storage performance and scalability problems Kualo has been battling with for years.
About Kualo
Kualo Web Hosting is a privately owned company headquartered in London, UK. Kualo serve tens of thousands of clients across the globe and provide fast, reliable and competitively priced web hosting services including shared web hosting, cloud and dedicated servers, domain name registration and reseller solutions.
The Impact
- Boost in performance – achieved all-flash performance at HDD only price;
- Significant reduction in TCO – due to the cost effective and scalable pricing model and reusing existing hardware;
- Increased scalability – Kualo can scale StorPool as the storage requirements grow;
- Time saving – maintaining multiple systems and dealing with intermittent issues has been eliminated;
- Downtime reduction and increased reliability – since StorPool was deployed, Kualo have experienced zero storage related outages.
Pain Points
Finding a suitable storage solution for their cloud hosting offering is the single most frustrating obstacle that Kualo has had to overcome to date. Their experience started with AppLogic but the storage speed and capacity limitations have been a repeating headache. They also looked at enterprise solutions which had the potential to solve these problems, but were prohibitively expensive. Over the years Kualo deployed numerous soſtware solutions – Nexenta, FreeNAS and OpenFiler, but in all cases they had rapidly encountered scalability issues, performance problems or both. Deploying StorPool allowed Kualo to replace these various systems with a single and reliable distributed storage solution that solved all storage problems.
The Reliable Distributed Storage Solution
Kualo’s initial solution consisted of two deployments of 3 storage nodes each which have expanded since to provide both additional capacity and increased performance. Due to the minimal resource usage (CPU & RAM) of StorPool’s soſtware, Kualo has the ability to use the storage nodes for computation as well as for storage in a converged fashion. Their initial 3 node deployment, even on reused hardware, achieved data transfer rates of up to 120,000 IOPS and over 1,7 GB/s. A new 3 node deployment of StorPool achieves more than 250,000 IOPS and 4 GB/s. The solution takes advantage of redundant 10G network to provide redundancy and impressive performance.
“StorPool is the solution to storage performance and scalability problems that we’ve been battling with for years. It has delivered the performance and reliability our clients require at a viable cost, virtually eliminated the time our engineering team spends dealing with storage related problems and it provides us with access to a fantastic team who excel at what they do and always go the extra mile to exceed our expectations. StorPool’s technical team have been exceptional from day one. They facilitated our initial test deployment and went above and beyond to assist us with benchmarking. They are relentless in their quest to get the best possible performance from our deployments and frequently make optimisation suggestions to further improve our data throughput.” Craig Luke, Operations Director, Kualo
Why StorPool
Over the years, Kualo have developed four key criteria for selecting storage infrastructure: performance, redundancy, scalability and cost-effectiveness. StorPool delivered superbly in all of these areas – something no other product they have either tested or deployed has been able to do, they say. With StorPool, Kualo managed to deploy a combination of older servers and new drives and achieved exceptional data throughput in a very cost effective manner.
Results
Kualo chose StorPool’s month-to-month licensing model. Paying only for what they use made considerable up-front savings for Kualo. This combined with StorPool’s ability to run on relatively low specification hardware allowed Kualo to grow seamlessly. Now they can add servers as they need and can even redeploy existing servers with minimal hardware changes.
Other results that Kualo highlight are:
- No unplanned outages or performance issues – the technical and engineering teams no longer live in a permanent state of high alert;
- Scalability – Kualo will be using StorPool in other areas of their business, including storage solutions for shared hosting and their enterprise level managed hosting clients;
- Simplified infrastructure – StorPool has a relatively small resource footprint, which has allowed Kualo to migrate their internal company servers onto their StorPool data nodes to simplify their internal infrastructure and provide additional savings through consolidation;
- Decreased TCO – significant reduction in TCO due to the pay-as-you-grow licensing model. They don’t have to pay upfront for capacity they don’t need;
- Increased revenue – having full confidence in the storage system allows Kualo to push sales. They are refreshing their entire cloud server offering to facilitate further revenue growth;
- Time saving – Kualo no longer need to maintain multiple systems and deal with frequent intermittent issues. This frees their team to concentrate on more more important things;
- Downtime reduction – downtime has been eliminated since implementing StorPool.
“I would recommend StorPool without hesitation. If you require high performance, affordable storage that ‘just works’ and is backed by a fantastic support team willing to go the extra mile, then look no further.” – Craig Luke – Operations Director, Kualo.
COMPANY: Kualo Web Hosting
INDUSTRY: Web Hosting & Public Cloud
PLATFORM: CentOS Linux, KVM and OnApp
WEBSITE: www.kualo.com
STORAGE SOLUTION: StorPool Storage. reliable distributed storage
THE SOLUTION: Reused existing hardware; Initial deployment of 6 StorPool storage servers; StorPool SSD Hybrid; Redundant 10Gbit multipath storage network; Cloud Management – OnApp
For a case study in .pdf format click HERE.
