The next BriefingsDirect cloud efficiency case study
explores how a storage-as-a-service offering in a university setting gains
performance and lower total cost benefits by a move to all-flash storage.
We’ll now learn how the University of British Columbia (UBC) has modernized its EduCloud storage service and attained both efficiency as well as better service levels for its diverse user base.
We’ll now learn how the University of British Columbia (UBC) has modernized its EduCloud storage service and attained both efficiency as well as better service levels for its diverse user base.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Read a full transcript or download a copy.
Here to help us explore new breeds
of SaaS solutions is Brent Dunington, System Architect at UBC in
Vancouver. The discussion is moderated by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.
Here are some excerpts:
Gardner: How is satisfying the storage demands at a large and diverse university setting a challenge? Is there something about your users and the diverse nature of their needs that provides you with a complex requirements list?
 |
| Dunington |
We have to
be able to offer those services, because as most people know, there are choices
-- and they can go somewhere else and choose those other products.
Our team is
a rather small team. There are 15 members in our team, so we have to be agile,
we have to be able to automate things, and we need tools that can work and
fulfill those needs. So it's just like any other business, even though it’s a university
setting.
HPE
Flash Performance
Gardner: Can you give us a sense of the scale
that describes your storage requirements?
Dunington: We do SaaS, we also do infrastructure-as-a-service
(IaaS). EduCloud is a self-service IaaS product that we deliver to UBC, but we
also deliver it to 25 other higher institutions in the Province of British
Columbia.
We have been
doing IaaS for five years, and we have been very, very successful. So more
people are looking to us for guidance.
Because we are
not just delivering to UBC, we have to be up running and always able to deliver,
because each school has different requirements. At different times of the year
-- because there is registration, there are exam times -- these things have to
be up. You can’t not be functioning during an exam and have 600 students not able
to take the tests that they have been studying for. So it impacts their life
and we want to make sure that we are there and can provide the services for what
they need.
Gardner: In order to maintain your service
levels within those peak times, do you in your IaaS and storage services employ
hybrid-cloud capabilities so that you can burst?
Or are you doing this all through your own data center and your own private
cloud?
On-Campus Cloud
Dunington: We do it all on-campus. British
Columbia has a law that says all the data has to stay in Canada. It’s a data-sovereignty
law, the data can't leave the borders.
That's why EduCloud
has been so successful, in my opinion, because of that option. They can just go
and throw things out in the private cloud.
The public
cloud providers are providing more services in Canada: Amazon Web Services
(AWS) and Microsoft Azure cloud are putting data centers in Canada, which is
good and it gives people an option. Our team’s goal is to provide the services,
whether it's a hybrid model or all on-campus. We just
want to be able to fulfill those needs.
Gardner: It sounds like the best of all worlds.
You are able to give that elasticity benefit, a lot of instant service
requirements met for your consumers. But you are starting to use cloud
pay-as-you-go types of models and get the benefit of the public cloud model --
but with the security, control and manageability of the private clouds.
What decisions
have you made about your storage underpinnings, the infrastructure
that supports your SaaS cloud?
Dunington: We have a large storage footprint.
For our site, it’s about 12 petabytes of storage. We realized that we weren’t
meeting the needs with spinning disks. One of the problems was that we had runaway
virtual workloads that would cause problems, and they would impact other services.
We needed some mechanism to fix that.
We
wanted to make sure that we had the ability to attain quality of
service levels and control those runaway virtual machines in our
footprint.
We went through the whole request for proposal (RFP)
process, and all the IT infrastructure vendors responded, but we did have some
guidelines that we wanted to go through. One of the things we did is present
our problems and make sure that they understood what the problems were and what
they were trying to solve.
And there
were some minimum requirements. We do have a backup vendor of choice that they needed to merge with. And quality of
service is a big thing. We wanted to make sure that we had the ability to
attain quality of service levels and control those runaway virtual machines in
our footprint.
Gardner: You gained more than just flash benefits
when you got to flash storage, right?
Streamlined, safe, flash storage
Dunington: Yes, for sure. With an entire data
center full of spinning disks, it gets to the point where the disks start to
manage you; you are no longer managing the disks. And the teams out there
changing drives, removing volumes around it, it becomes unwieldy. I mean, the
power, the footprint, and all that starts to grow.
Also, Vancouver
is in a seismic zone, we are right up against the Pacific plate and it's a very
active seismic area. Heaven forbid anything happens, but one of the
requirements we had was to move the data center into the interior of the province.
So that was what we did.
When we brought
this new data center online, one of the decisions the team made was to move to an
all-flash storage environment. We wanted to be sure that it made financial
sense because it's publicly funded, and also improved the user experience, across
the province.
Gardner: As you were going about your
decision-making process, you had choices, what made you choose what you did? What
were the deciding factors?
Dunington: There were a lot of deciding
factors. There’s the technology, of being able to meet the performance and to
manage the performance. One of the things was to lock down runaway virtual
machines and to put performance tiers on others.
But it’s not
just the technology; it's also the business part, too. The financial part had
to make sense. When you are buying any storage platform, you are also buying
the support team and the sales team that come with it.
Our team
believes that technology is a certain piece of the pie, and the rest of it is relationship.
If that relationship part doesn't work, it doesn’t matter how well the
technology part works -- the whole thing is going to break down.
Because software
is software, hardware is hardware -- it breaks, it has problems, there are limitations.
And when you have to call someone, you have to depend on him or her. Even though
you bought the best technology and got the best price -- if it doesn't work, it
doesn’t work, and you need someone to call.
So those service
and support issues were all wrapped up into the decision.
HPE
Flash Performance
We chose the Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE)
3PAR all-flash storage platform. We have been very happy with it. We knew the HPE team well.
They came and worked with us on the server blade infrastructure, so we knew the
team. The team knew how to support all of it.
We also use the HPE OneView product for provisioning, and it integrated into that all. It also supported the performance optimization tool (IT Operations Management for HPE OneView) to let us set those values, because one of the things in EduCloud is customers choose their own storage tier, and we mark the price on it. So basically all we would do is present that new tier as new data storage within VMware and then they would just move their workloads across non-disruptively. So it has worked really well.
We also use the HPE OneView product for provisioning, and it integrated into that all. It also supported the performance optimization tool (IT Operations Management for HPE OneView) to let us set those values, because one of the things in EduCloud is customers choose their own storage tier, and we mark the price on it. So basically all we would do is present that new tier as new data storage within VMware and then they would just move their workloads across non-disruptively. So it has worked really well.
The 3PAR
storage piece also integrates
with VMware vRealize Operations Manager. We offer that to all our clients
as a portal so they can see how everything is working and they can do their own
diagnostics. Because that’s the one goal we have with EduCloud, it has to be self-service.
We can let the customers do it, that's what they want.
Gardner: Not that long ago people had the
idea that flash was always more expensive and that they would use it for just
certain use-cases rather than pervasively. You have been talking in terms of a total
cost of ownership reduction. So how does that work? How does the economics of
this over a period of time, taking everything into consideration, benefit you
all?
Economic sense at scale
Dunington: Our IT team and our management team
are really good with that part. They were able to break it all down, and they found
that this model would work at scale. I don’t know the numbers per se, but it
made economic sense.
Spinning
disks will still have a place in the data center. I don't know a year from now
if an all-flash data center will make sense, because there are some records that
people will throw in and never touch. But right now with the numbers on how we
worked it out, it makes sense, because we are using the standard bronze, the
gold, the silver tiers, and with the tiers it makes sense.
The 3PAR solution
also has dedupe functionality and the compression that they just released. We are
hoping to see how well that trends. Compression has only been around for a
short period of time, so I can’t really say, but the dedupe has done really
well for us.
Gardner: The technology overcomes some of
the other baseline economic costs and issues, for sure.
We have
talked about the technology and performance requirements. Have you been able to
qualify how, from a user experience, this has been a benefit?
Dunington: The best benchmark is the adoption
rate. People are using it, and there are no help desk tickets, so no one is
complaining. People are using it, and we can see that everything is ramping up,
and we are not getting tickets. No one is complaining about the price, the
availability. Our operational team isn't complaining about it being harder to
manage or that the backups aren’t working. That makes me happy.
The big picture
Gardner: Brent, maybe a word of advice to
other organizations that are thinking about a similar move to private cloud SaaS.
Now that you have done this, what might you advise them to do as they prepare
for or evaluate a similar activity?
Not everybody needs that speed, not everybody needs that performance, but it is the future and things will move there.
Dunington: Look at the full picture, look at
the total cost of ownership. There’s the buying of the hardware, and there's also
supporting the hardware, too. Make sure that you understand your requirements
and what your customers are looking for first before you go out and buy it. Not
everybody needs that speed, not everybody needs that performance, but it is the
future and things will move there. We will see in a couple of years how it went.
Look at the
big picture, step back. It’s just not the new shiny toy, and you might have to
take a stepped approach into buying, but for us it worked. I mean, it’s a solid
platform, our team sleeps well at night, and I think our customers are really
happy with it.
Gardner: This might be a little bit of a pun
in the education field, but do your homework and you will benefit.
HPE
Flash Performance
Dunington: Yes, for sure.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
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