The Challenge
When the UK's number one Mac-only ISP decided to rethink their datacenter strategy to accommodate the growing demand for virtual and cloud-based services, reliability and down-time became a main concern for the country's most successful hosting provider. The immense size of MacAce's customer-base demanded a solution that would provide the organization with a high degree of fault-tolerance, management efficiency and uninterrupted data availability.
Storage consumption was the second key concern for the growing ISP. "We required a fast and scalable solution to drive our virtualized network and expand our storage capabilities with enough capacity for tens of thousands of users. We required built-in resilience with dual active-active controllers and fast data transfers suitable for hundreds of VPS connection" said Gary Hall, Founder and CEO of MacAce.
Additionally, the new storage platform would need to fit within their current DR strategy and allow data to be replicated across multiple MacAce datacenters. "Our plan was to find a solution that would give us the ability to mirror the data into our second and third datacenters with ease" noted Hall.
"We required a fast and scalable solution to drive our virtualized network and expand our storage capabilities with enough capacity for tens of thousands of users."
Gary Hall Founder and CEO, MacAce
The Solution
After extensive product research, MacAce selected Enhance Technology's ULTRASTOR ES3160P4 iSCSI-SAN based on features, customer reviews and positive industry feedback. The ES3160P4's modular design, redundant storage controllers and expandability (up to 256TB) provided MacAce with a flexible storage platform with enough power to support the ISP's multi-tenant data environment.
The ES3160P4 connects to an array of custom-built, clustered servers through the company's award-winning network infrastructure. "We work on a 3-route system where possible, so that no single point of failure can affect our network or service" states Hall. "We believe in high quality and personal support. The support you get is from the same people that build and maintain our entire network – us".
The top factors in selecting Enhance Technology were scalability and reliability according to Gary Hall. "The ULTRASTOR ES3160P4 ticked the right boxes for speed, expandability (by simply adding cost-effective expansion arrays) and dual controllers provided the extra layer of resilience we were looking for."
Performance, Reliability and Features
The ULTRASTOR ES3160P4 is a dual controller, Active-Active, iSCSI SAN storage solution designed for high data availability and 24/7 operation. Featuring eight 1GbE iSCSI data ports, users can attach the ES3160P4 to multiple servers to ensure data accessibility with high-performance and full iSCSI bandwidth. In addition to the ES3160P4's dual RAID controllers and I/O modules, the dual redundant power supplies and cooling modules are hot-swappable and are easily field-replaceable, providing the ultimate redundancy and reliability for mission critical and data intensive applications to meet storage requirements across the most demanding environments.
"We've been impressed by the reliability and the speed of the systems in particular. Installation and setup was very simple and they have performed faultlessly with continually increased load. Performance and IO wait have been significantly improved over our previous storage systems."
Gary Hall Founder and CEO, MacAce
About MacAce
Since our inception in 1996 we've been providing Mac-based internet services, enjoying rapid growth over recent years. We evolved, like many Mac-companies, from the creative industry. The MacAce name soon became synonymous with superior support, ardent Mac knowledge as well as levels of speed and reliability that are ground-breaking, including our 100% uptime guarantee and industry-first "Money back guarantee" for our hosting, broadband and email services. To learn more about MacAce, please visit www.macace.net
About Enhance Technology, Inc.
Founded in 1997, Enhance Technology, Inc. is a recognized technology leader bringing high-quality storage products and solutions to the global IT marketplace. Enhance Technology offers a diverse range of Primary and Nearline storage solutions for virtualization, records compliance, database, cloud services providers, medical imaging, disk-based backup, geophysical/geographical imaging and digital media production applications. To learn more about Enhance Technology, please visit www.enhance-tech.com
