Transitioning a Legacy Hosting Business to a Modern

Virtualized Cloud Service Providing Business

Raffaello Poltronieri

Cloud specialist

Clouditalia overview

2012 → 2015

Storage evolution

Company needs

Market offering

Solution adopted Results

Future

Agenda

Clouditalia was born in 2012 from former Eutelia, acquiring its precious assets

in terms of people skills and network infrastructure.

Today Clouditalia is the first italian CSP that controls every step of its business

joining a proprietary network all across the Country including 14.000 Kms of

optical fibre with two next-generation Datacentres.

2012 → 2015

• A brand new Datacenter in Milan

Telecity Group will join the existing

ones built in 2012

• A new 100Gbps backbone Milan –

Rome, latency: <15%

• Beside storage evolution, our

computing capacity increased of 50%

• Cloud services are in continue

development, expecially thanks to Tintri

in terms of QoS.

Storage evolution

Datacentres: solid but traditional NFS storage paradigm. A mix of

SAS, SATA and Flash (just for cache).

Performances and reliability at a good price.

That was the way to go for 2012.

Month by month customers growing in number and dimensions:

performances rapidly degrading.

That mix NOT enough anymore in performances terms, albeit still

reliable.

Maintenance renewal cost not affordable.

Storage evolution - 2

0

20

40

60

80

100

120

10 2012 03 2013 08 2013 01 2014 06 2014 11 2014 04 2015 8 2015

Perf

Cust

GB

Company needs

Customer evolution, moving SAP and SQL

–like application to the cloud: need for

PERFORMANCES.

Our virtual infrastructure required a daily

Storage vmotion

Main cause: SATA disks

New applications and more confidence in

our cloud moved more data inside our

datastores: storage CAPACITY low!

All these operations needed time and

skills: need for SIMPLICITY

Company needs - 2

Backup snapshot-based: SLOW and

HEAVY for production VMs

High density Datacenters make available

LITTLE SPACE, so every cm in Rack

Space is gold!

COST for direct and indirect energy, and

maintenance renewal.

Market offerings A look to the market made us decide between:

• Traditional (Renew/Expansion of the current one)

• Traditional (New one)

• SDS (either All Flash or Hybrid)

Analysing our CSP dynamic environment, we found that

the challenge had to be between SDSs.

Tintri allows performance management, shows analytics

and reorders IOPS, all of these in a “per-VM” way.

Most Hybrid SANs write to spindle first and the SSD is

used for read cache, mostly a unprotected tier.

TINTRI uses a Flash first, writing to SSD first with SSD

protection. On top of this it do dedup and compression

on the fly

Solution Adopted

Traditional: too static. BUT We decided to give new life to

the existing arrays applying PernixData technology.

All Flash arrays: actually too expensive and not ever fitting

such dynamic environments.

Tintri is a great mix of performances due to SSD and

cheapness thanks to SAS disks.

Moreover, “Zero touch IT” once you’ve installed a TINTRI,

allows our company to save hundreds of specialist hours.

Results

• Setup speed

• Fast VMs moving from P.O.C. to production

• Physical GBs are x1,7 thanks to dedup and compression

• Dramatic reduction of ms latency per volume

• QoS

• V.I.P. customers

• New catalog item: “fast storage”

• TGCS GUI for global dashboard and analytics

• Comparison no more just €/Tb

Keep it simple!!

Future

Our goal is to move all of our storage capacity to Tintri.

The previous reasons that can justify this decision can be

further confirmed by a couple of considerations:

We almost didn’t have to ask for a P.O.C.: this means that

Tintri really believe in what they say and they sell.

Support: we received full support even during that P.O.C.

(that wasn’t due) and they took care of the issue in a

professional and responsible way, but above all, in a FAST

way.