6. Our Journey to the Cloud
In 2009, we set ourselves the challenge of changing our
traditional architecture to cloud architecture, without loss of
availability for our 250,000 clients
We had 3,500 live servers
– They occupied space in the Data Centre
– High energy bills
– 6 hours to deploy a machine (50 per month)
– Many hours spent on administration
– Our clients wanted more (capacity) for less (€)
– Some companies in the US already had Cloud Hosting services
7. How did we take our platform to the Cloud and set up a
Private Cloud?
• Initially we used a traditional architecture (DAS/ in-house
hosting)
• We started the project based on VMWare and shared storage,
until we opted for HP T400 3PAR
– DNS servers: from 75 to 10 servers
– Email servers: from 600 to 90 servers
– Shared hosting servers: from 324 to 40 servers
• At the end of phase one of the migration project: a ratio of 7:1
• We removed 860 servers (25 racks) from our IDC. We added
5 storage racks and improved the services
An example: We went from managing 2,000 email accounts per server to 20,000
8. 860 fewer servers!!!
• Less power consumption
• Less technical space occupied
• More servers available to reuse
• Easier to manage for our technical departments
• Costs cut by €85,000/month
Without affecting the service of our 250,000 clients. Even improving service levels
With our experience, we decided to launch this service to our clients on
the mass market:
- CloudBuilder IaaS solution, chosen as the platform for the European
Union's Cloud Project
- New Managed Hosting business division targeted at Major Accounts
9. Most importantly... What would have happened if we
had not ventured to change to Cloud?
– Today we would have 3,000 live servers
– We would have invested €11 million (new
servers, new DC and electricity)
– It would take us hours to provision a server
– We'd need more HR
– We wouldn't compete in the international
IaaS market
10. We continued to lead, because we ventured into the
Cloud
•900 fewer server operating platforms
•Reduced provision times: from 6 hours to 7 minutes
Operational •Widespread high availability and DRP
advantages •Efficient maintenance and patching
•Improved security management
Economic Reduced costs and investment:
advantages more than €10,000,000 in the last 2 years
•European pioneers in IaaS platforms
•Launch of IaaS solutions (CloudBuilder) and PaaS
Business •40% of new business
advantages •10% of the turnover in the first financial year
•More than 1,000 clients with Cloud products
•Major product improvements for all clients
12. How we chose the Why we chose HP 3PAR
providers at Arsys
– Magic quadrants – Ease of scalability
– Proof-of-concept tests on three – Performance
providers – Efficiency
– Parameters: Practicality, Service • Ease of provisioning
and Cost • Optimization of service levels
• Adaptive Optimization and
In this case, the lowest operating costs Dynamic Optimization features
offset the higher initial investment – Ease of management
– FC/ iSCSI
13. Adopted solution
– Two HP 3PAR T400 storage systems. With dual
controller, 40 TB net and Adaptive Optimization
– DL580 servers with 4 x Intel Xeon X7560 CPU
(2.26GHz/8-core/24MB/130W) 640 GB RAM
– VMware vSphere
15. Performance
4x better performance compared to our previous
systems,
And more... the systems are operating at half
capacity (2 controllers, but they can be increased
to 4)
Lower management costs
– We have halved the number of hours of our
storage management technicians
– No calls to the help desk regarding poor
performance
Efficiency
– Thin Provisioning technologies allowed us to over-provision the space of some systems by up to
twice their real volume
– We delay the purchase of new storage by over-allocating resources
– Also, less space is required in the Internet Data Centre
– Reduced costs by optimizing tiering (Adaptive Optimization and Dynamic Optimization )
– By using Adaptive Optimization, and by buying SATA drives instead of FC, we've cut these systems'
operating costs by approximately 30%, without any noticeable impact on system performance
17. Outlook
Virtualisation of: Projects:
Development and pre-production Introducing a Grid Computing system to
environments, migrating from Legacy study malicious attack trends
Storage to 3PAR
Data Warehouse New CloudBuilder developments
