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WWI Backup StorageCase Study

Compuverde vNAS enables service provider to offer cost-effective, secure and fast backup for its Veeam Cloud Connect solution

Challenge: To find a solid and secure storage solution for an offsite

backup solution. To minimize administration – and the

required overhead – by having all data in one massive

storage pool.

Solution: Compuverde vNAS

Platform: Intel / Cisco

Use Case: High security, availability and performance for backup

solution.

WWI is a Managed Service Provider & IT Consulting company located in Denmark. With a history of 24 years in the industry, their main focus is to manage their customers' IT installations, whether they be on premise, in the cloud or hosted on WWI's cloud platform. WWI offers consulting services on Storage, Virtualization, Desktop Deployments, Citrix, Printing, Networking and Wireless. Four departments are located across Denmark, covering most of the country. With their top management closely involved in the day-to-day operations, agility has become one of their strengths.

Two years ago, WWI joined the Veeam Cloud Connect program. This is a product and a program where service providers provide offsite backup storage to on premise customers. WWI needed a suitable and solid back-end storage solution for their new Cloud Connect solution.

Benefits:

• 4x Performance compared to similar tested solutions

• TCO lowered by 50 %

• High Availability and extremely fast recovery

• Highly Scalable

• Less administrative overhead compared to alternatives

• Utilize latest hardware without replacing the entire storage environment

We are looking into other areas of our hosting service where we can benefit from deploying Compuverde storage.

Mathis NyboCTO of WWI

Managed Service Provider

Business Overview

1.2PB

www.wwi.dk

www.compuverde.com

It was evident from WWI's experience, that the storage would have to be fast, provide stability, preserve data integrity as well as being highly scalable to accommodate for future demands. Another requirement was the ability to do hardware and software maintenance without any downtime on the storage. Besides, WWI prefer to devote their time on customers and to enhance their solutions rather than managing storage.

As organizations struggle to meet the demands of today’s data deluge, they must weigh performance against affordability. Carl-Henric Möllerström, VP at Compuverde, says: “Service providers today are facing exponentially larger data loads than ever before. This calls for agile storage solutions that can meet current and future needs – without breaking the bank. Traditional storage solutions rapidly become too complex and difficult to build upon, increasing the cost of implementation and maintenance. Our work with WWI demonstrates that it is possible to increase capacity and performance in demanding environments while reducing costs and simplifying management"

WWI was looking for a storage solution where they did not have to manage small storage spaces. Mathis Nybo, CTO of WWI, explains, "As we are dealing with customer backup, their data and thereby backup storage requirements constantly grows, we needed

Compuverde vNAS turned out to be the perfect fit for all the requirements. Not only does the solution scale extremely well, but it eliminates the need for forklift upgrades: "Every time we need to scale, we now have the option of rethinking our hardware choices, taking advantage of new hardware without having to replace our entire storage environment. This for us is extremely important as it helps us stay ahead in our industry and to keep up with all the new hardware trends, without having to constantly perform expensive forklift upgrades".

With a storage solution from Compuverde, the entire storage cluster creates one large storage space instead

a solution that would manage that in a cost effective manner; that is: one large chunk of storage".

When handling backup data, even the smallest risk of corruption or data loss is not an option. Thus, data integrity became the number one concern. "We needed a storage solution which could provide scalability way beyond that of DAS and with greater security than RAID5 or RAID6 can provide", Nybo said.

WWI started to examine distributed storage systems like Microsoft Storage Spaces and Ceph, in addition to standalone servers with DAS. But the traditional approach to storage 'just wasn't enough'. Compuverde came early into the picture. Other solutions lacked both the flexibility and the performance that Compuverde offers.

Solution and Benefits

of multiple small spaces where each would require its own overhead. Data integrity is secured by Erasure Coding together with self-healing functionality. Also, multiple file systems can be created that will utilize the same joint overhead.

"The solution from Compuverde is extremely simple to install, configure and manage", Mathis Nybo says. "There's no longer a need for our engineers to attend week-long courses in 'SAN Management'. The management tool is just that easy to get started with, and with little to no training, an Engineer can manage the solution on a day to day basis".

"Having worked with a lot of vendors throughout the years, it has been a pleasure to work with Compuverde and their support

team"

Challenges

Solution

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Features like Virtual IP ensure that the storage is accessible at all times, even when nodes are down or just being updated. And with NVMe cache, the Compuverde solution outperforms most other storage solutions available. "The Compuverde solution really shines due to NVMe cache", Nybo says. 10 Gbit Ethernet was used, for the network to keep up with the rest of the system. To ensure single-stream performance, low latency switches were used. "It is pretty impressive to see terabytes of data being rebalanced to one node in just hours, simultaneously maxing out all drives in a storage node".

The backup storage has no problem keeping up with customer backup demands, even Veeam tasks such as merging, compacting and health checks are running much faster than they could have ever hoped for, WWI reports.

The Snapshot feature built into the Compuverde storage system, and not controlled by the backup server, will help to safeguard against ransomware as a "last line of defense" by providing multiple versions of backup data to roll back to.

SetupFor the initial setup, eight nodes were used to form the storage cluster, each with NVMe cache and 3.5” capacity drives, the solution can be scaled out indefinitely with virtually no limitation.

The solution is focused on security, but not on the individual node; instead to tolerate failure to entire storage nodes, rather than building each node highly redundant within themselves in terms of hardware. "With Compuverde we can lose entire storage nodes, and still keep our customers' backup data safe and available for restore", Nybo says.

WWI chose the solution mainly to get a single large repository for storing all of their backups, rather than having to deal with servers with local storage – and the headaches that comes with it. With Compuverde, storage can be added as needed, without having to migrate backup jobs to new storage.

Nybo says: "It’s all seamless from Veeam's point of

view. A 800TB repository just became 1.2PB".

WWI has been using the Compuverde storage solution for nearly two years. "It is a very stable and easy to use storage platform", Mathis Nybo says. "We don’t have to worry about it at all, I’d actually call it worry free storage. Unless we are adding a storage node or upgrading firmware, the platform is so easy that we don’t need to think about it. And we got multiple times the performance of other solutions we tested. With multiple backup jobs being active from various customers – due to the way Compuverde scales and are able to utilize all drives in the cluster at once, we get even better performance".

There is no need to have any number of terabytes of free space on every chunk of storage, which need to be used for Veeam specific features like compacting, or to have reservations for customer growth within their backup storage. This makes the solution much more space efficient and thereby cost effective. There is no need to move customers around onto small chunks of storage. Just a simple interface and simple operations.

"My impression throughout the entire project, which has only been reinforced by how well the solution has been running and performing, is that Compuverde has managed to make storage simple, without sacrificing neither features nor performance. We have already begun looking into other areas of our hosting service where we can benefit from deploying Compuverde", Mathis Nybo says.

The solution is for anyone looking for simple management, fast storage and extreme scalability and a very high level of availability. Nybo says, "We are very happy with the solution and would recommend it to anyone dealing with a large amount of backup data".

"... impressive to see terabytes of data being rebalanced to one node in just hours, simultaneously maxing

out all drives in a storage node"

"The platform is so easy that we don’t need to think about it

– sometimes we login to the management just to see that

it’s still there ..."

Benefits

Copyright 2017 Compuverde. All rights reserved. All trademarks referred to in this document are the property of their respective owners. This document is for informational purposes only and does not set forth any warranty, expressed or implied.

Data integrity, Security and Availability.

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24 7

Highlights

Erasure Coding reduces the footprint, improves failover and makes the system near immune to damage.

High performance - a backup solution that can keep up with the rest of the system.

User friendly, easy to set up and maintenance.

Reduced OPEX and no need for surplus overhead or hot spares.$

Hardware agnostic / Scale-out: Taking advantage of new hardware without the need for forklift upgrades.

Number of nodes 8

CPUs Intel® Xeon® E3-1271v3

RAM 32 GB each node

Cache Intel P3700 NVMe

Storage drives HGST

Controller LSI

NIC 2 x 10 GbE with LACP

Switches 2 x Cisco Nexus

Document Created: 2017-02-27

Initial System Configuration

Pointers

• To utilize the full potential of the Compuverde storage, consider 10 Gbit network or better

• Use low latency switches when single-stream performance is important

• Aim for multiple concurrent jobs, as one single job can never utilize all of the Compuverde performance potential by itself

• Make sure to optimize the number of concurrent tasks in Veeam, both Proxy and Repository

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