The All-Flash Array Built for the Next Generation Data Center

Customer Case Study High Performance, Seamless Scale for MercadoLibre’s OpenStack Private Cloud

Company Overview The Solution MercadoLibre is the largest e-commerce ecosystem in , MercadoLibre looked at a variety of storage solutions — tiered, offering a wide range of services to sellers and buyers throughout the hyper-converged and all-flash — and had clear requirements region, including marketplace, payments, advertising and e-building around OpenStack integration, scale-out, consistent 3 millisecond solutions. Operating in 13 countries, including , , latency and native remote replication features. First introduced to , , , and , MercadoLibre provides SolidFire at the fall 2013 OpenStack Design Summit in Hong Kong, buyers and sellers a robust online trading environment that fosters MercadoLibre also heard about SolidFire from an existing U.S.-based the development of a large and growing e-commerce community. SolidFire customer.

Business Challenges “We were looking for a solution that could scale out MercadoLibre’s IT infrastructure is deployed within an OpenStack private cloud, including development and production environments. so that we can add more and more nodes, growing Its legacy storage infrastructure was unable to provide the performance capacity and performance without downtime. With and scale required to meet the needs of its expanding application SolidFire, we can start with a small infrastructure and base. “Administrators were asking us to give them a different type of storage, one that was more agile and more efficient,” said Mariano add the nodes in a granular, non-disruptive fashion as Guelar, MercadoLibre storage specialist. “We had a lot of trouble demand dictates.” balancing the performance of workloads within our current system and it was almost impossible to arrive at a point where everyone was satisfied with application performance and system latency.” “We sat through a live product demonstration to get a look at Within its OpenStack cloud, MercadoLibre runs a variety of the product interface, and did some testing to get a feel for how applications, including MySQL and MongoDB databases, all of our workloads would perform on the SolidFire platform,” Guelar which were suffering from slow, unpredictable performance. “With explained. “We liked what we saw. The tests performed better than Mongo, we had a lot of performance issues. When you have database we expected, and it was easy to manage.” workloads that need to be flushed from memory to disk, we had a lot of latency with our previous solution writing to disk. SolidFire solved Comprehensive OpenStack Integration this issue,” Guelar said. Deep OpenStack integration was a critical requirement for MercadoLibre. “SolidFire’s Cinder driver is natively integrated Finding a scale-out storage solution was also important to within OpenStack, which allows SolidFire to seamlessly plug into MercadoLibre. “Scale-up storage designs are not easy to scale. To MercadoLibre’s existing cloud orchestration framework,” Guelar said. grow, you actually have to buy a separate, larger system. When you do this, you incur significant downtime during migration, and that’s not good for us because we run 24x7 and need 100% uptime,” Guelar Ensuring Faster, More Predictable Performance said. “We wanted a solution where we could start small and add the Database and system administrators at MercadoLibre needed storage capacity and performance we needed, when we needed them.” that provided more predictable performance and faster application

solidfire.com response times. SolidFire’s all-flash architecture and unique Quality “We have a lot of copies. For example, the MongoDB databases have of Service (QoS) allowed MercadoLibre to significantly reduce latency. different shards. Each shard has three nodes — the same copy and Guelar elaborated, “We were looking for a solution that gives us very data. They write that data to those three nodes, they read all the good performance. With SolidFire, the performance is excellent, and information and then replicate between them,” Guelar said. “The with guaranteed Quality of Service (QoS) we are able to deliver a more compression and deduplication SolidFire provides dramatically predictable and scalable set of services to our developers and our DBAs.” reduces our data footprint, floor space requirements and our power and cooling needs.” Scale On Demand As Grows

MercadoLibre was looking to solve a number of issues with a new storage platform. Its current platforms struggled to scale non- “We preferred native, array-based replication over a disruptively, and the prospect of having to buy new arrays as third-party solution as it allowed us to keep things infrastructure demands increased did not align with the granular very simple and consolidate all management within scalability they were seeking. “We were looking for a solution that could scale out so that we can add more and more nodes, growing OpenStack / Cinder.” capacity and performance without downtime. With SolidFire, we can start with a small infrastructure and add nodes in a granular, non- disruptive fashion as demand dictates,” Guelar said. Business Results Integrated Data Protection MercadoLibre’s performance improvements were immediate. “Our latency is now around 2 milliseconds. With our legacy storage MercadoLibre keeps a copy of its data in two physically separate systems, inconsistent latency was always an issue, often seeing systems, therefore remote replication was a must-have feature. latency peaks around 50 milliseconds — a huge issue for customers Additionally, it preferred array-based remote replication that could and database workloads,” Guelar said. be natively managed from OpenStack / Cinder.

Inline deduplication and compression reduced MercadoLibre’s data “We preferred native, array-based replication over a third-party footprint by 6.5x. Guelar explained. “We are saving a lot of space solution as it allowed us to keep things very simple and consolidate and power in our data center now, so that’s a great benefit. That was all management within OpenStack / Cinder. When you create a really, really good for us.” replica in OpenStack, it can automatically create a replica on the other side,” Guelar said. “We don’t have to select the volume and “For companies looking to deploy an OpenStack private cloud or configure the replica. We can simply schedule the work and it gets enhance an existing cloud infrastructure, SolidFire is a great choice,” done — everything, automatically.” Guelar said. “It’s a very good product designed from the ground up, with the future of where large scale data centers are heading in mind. Reducing the Storage Footprint For a cloud service company or enterprise developing or managing Because it deploys multiple copies of its MongoDB database, a private cloud infrastructure, SolidFire gives you proven integration MercadoLibre gets significant data reduction through SolidFire’s with excellent scale and predictability.” always-on, inline deduplication and compression.

Key Highlights Solution: Key Benefits: 12 SolidFire SF6010 deployed in U.S.-based data center Scale-out High-performance block storage for OpenStack private cloud Guaranteed performance Reduced data center footprint, power and cooling Inline efficiency Improved latency by up to 25x Scale-out architecture enables granular growth

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