Storage and virtualization bring competitive advantage Customer profile Secure cloud hosting provider FireHost offers customers lightning-fast performance in multiple data tiers Company FireHost Industry Hosting Solutions Country United States Employees 100 Web site firehost.com Business Need FireHost provides secure cloud hosting services in a multi-tenant public cloud environment. The company was successfully running Dell™ PowerEdge™ blade servers, but its storage solution was struggling to keep up with rapid growth in the business. Solution FireHost deployed Dell Compellent™ Storage Center SANs in its data centers in the United States and Europe. Each array hosts roughly 1,200 VMware®- based virtual machines. Benefits • Less than 2 millisecond latency for data writes to storage Tiers 1 and 2 • A few hours to add storage capacity, with no downtime • A few minutes to restore a server • More efficient thin provisioning vs. EMC and HP solutions “We get a great storage product from Dell, Solutions Featured but the real value is in the relationship • Backup and Recovery we’ve built.” • Cloud Computing • Data Center Virtualization Todd Gleason, Director of Technology, FireHost • Dell Financial Services • Networking • Server • Storage For hosting businesses, one key to success is finding storage solutions that carefully balance performance, capacity, scalability and cost-effectiveness. After some early misses, secure cloud hosting provider FireHost found its storage sweet spot in Dell Compellent technology. FireHost fills a unique market niche. “Some hosting businesses provide only expensive Technology at work dedicated servers, while many cloud providers Solutions are rushing to offer the cheapest possible computing power,” says Bruce MacFadyen, Dell™ Financial Services COO of FireHost. “We’ve found a middle “ Our secure cloud ground. We provide high performance—as Services well as compliance with PCI data security Dell Compellent™ Copilot infrastructure, using standards, Health Information Trust Alliance Optimize Dell Compellent (HITRUST), ISO27001, data protection acts and more—in an environment that is entirely multi- Dell Support Services -Dell ProSupport™ Mission Critical storage, can beat tenant public cloud.” with four hour onsite response the performance The concept is gaining traction. “Over the past Hardware that our enterprise year, we’ve attracted the attention of some very large enterprises,” MacFadyen says. “For Brocade® M5424 Fibre Channel customers get from example, a major ticketing company is in blade switches the process of moving its servers into our Dell Compellent Storage Center SANs dedicated servers, environment. It wanted the ability to flex its dedicated storage IT infrastructure up and down based on the Dell PowerConnect™ M8024-k events in its sales pipeline. Traditional PCI- 10GbE switches compliant environments can’t offer that.” and private cloud Dell PowerEdge™ M1000e modular blade enclosures configurations.” Scalable storage solution is the right fit Todd Gleason, In the past three years, FireHost has Dell PowerEdge M620 blade ® ® Director of Technology, experimented with technologies to find the servers with Intel Xeon FireHost right fit. Early on, it standardized on a VMware processors E5-2600 series vSphere-based virtual platform on Dell PowerEdge blade servers, a combination that Software has worked well. “We’re 100 percent VMware,” Dell Compellent Data Instant Replay says Todd Gleason, director of technology. “vSphere is the most stable and secure, Dell Compellent Data Progression most advanced, and highest-performing Dell Compellent Dynamic Capacity virtualization platform in the market.” Dell Compellent Enterprise However, FireHost’s original storage solution Manager with vSphere 5 Integration had difficulty supporting the company’s rapid Dell Compellent Fast Track growth. When FireHost decided to take its storage environment in a new direction, it Dell Compellent Remote considered EMC® VNX, HP 3PAR and Dell Instant Replay Compellent solutions. “We were immediately VMware® vSphere 5 impressed with the forward-thinking Dell Compellent technology,” MacFadyen says. 2 FireHost was also impressed with the solution’s tier a customer selects is the tier the data will simplified management and with its support ultimately reside on.” But to accelerate write for both Fibre Channel and iSCSI connectivity. performance, FireHost uses its SSD tier as a Perhaps most important, Dell Compellent giant write cache. storage offers the scalability FireHost needs. “All customer data assigned to SSD or SAS is “Compared with other storage products in first written to SSD,” Gleason says. “This gives the market, scalability is much better in Dell us optimal performance when ingesting Compellent,” says Gleason. “Adding capacity customer data. For customers who subscribe to an array is straightforward, and the idea of to SAS, Data Progression moves the data avoiding forklift upgrades was very appealing down to Tier 2 at night, as Data Instant Replay to us.” runs. We get the performance benefits of SSD and can still offer customers the lower price Large-scale backup solution with of higher-capacity storage. We don’t have to recovery in minutes sacrifice performance for capacity.” FireHost standardized on Dell Compellent Storage Center storage area networks (SANs). Dell Compellent Fast Track further increases Now the company runs five SANs in its data performance by storing frequently accessed centers across North America and Europe. data on the outer, faster tracks of each disk. Each houses three tiers of disks: solid-state “Fast Track technology is one more piece of the drives (SSD) for Tier 1, SAS drives for Tier 2 and puzzle in optimizing performance,” Gleason says. “ We love Dell SATA drives for Tier 3. Compellent Copilot The combination of Dell Compellent The five arrays run in a “secure cloud pod” technologies delivers great performance and Support. Talking that hosts more than 5,000 virtual machines storage efficiency for FireHost. “Performance (VMs). “Successfully supporting that many discussions tend to focus on IOPS or to Dell’s support systems requires quick, efficient backups,” throughput, but latency is key for us,” Gleason engineers helps us Gleason says. “We take snapshots using says. “We want a response of 2 milliseconds Dell Compellent Data Instant Replay. or less for Tiers 1 and 2. Writing to SSD provide proactive We can recover data from a local Replay with the Dell Compellent solution, we achieve in a matter of minutes, and Data Instant this. The performance is awesome!” support to our Replay is much more efficient than most end users.” snapshot technologies.” Competitive total cost of ownership FireHost is achieving a competitive advantage Todd Gleason, Dell Compellent Remote Instant Replay through its Dell Compellent technologies. “The Director of Technology, replicates incremental changes in data three pillars of our secure cloud hosting service FireHost between the arrays over the wide-area are enterprise-grade security, performance and network. “SAN-level replication provides managed support,” Gleason says. “Our secure business continuity for our customers, and cloud infrastructure, using Dell Compellent it does so efficiently,” Gleason says. “We use storage, can beat the performance that our Fibre Channel exclusively for production enterprise customers get from dedicated connectivity; we use iSCSI for replication, servers, dedicated storage and private cloud which is far more cost-effective. We offer two configurations. The storage platform helps weeks of backup for every secure server we FireHost deliver the performance and security sell. Remote Instant Replay enables us to meet our customers need with the flexible cost this service-level agreement, and our recovery model the cloud demands.” time is minutes in most cases.” The longevity of the storage solution’s different Advanced performance with data tiering components contributes to its excellent total FireHost uses Dell Compellent Data cost of ownership (TCO). “The fact that we Progression to automatically move data can continue to use the equipment we’ve between tiers, but its approach is somewhat already invested in, even as we make upgrades, unusual. “Our customers purchase SSD, SAS is a major benefit of Dell Compellent or SATA storage from us,” Gleason says. “The storage,” Gleason says. “If a new connectivity 3 technology comes out, we can replace the 70 percent more processing power in FireHost is using the Broadcom® version networking but continue using the rest of the same footprint of Dell’s unique Select Network Adapter in array. We can replace the controllers without FireHost is working with Dell to improve its PowerEdge M620 blades to improve repurchasing the software we’ve already paid efficiency throughout the data center. “We resource utilization with Switch-Independent for, and if a new drive comes out, we can just recently migrated from Dell PowerEdge M910 Partitioning technology. “Each card has two plug it in.” blades to PowerEdge M620 blades,” Gleason 10-Gigabit Ethernet ports,” Gleason explains. says. “We’re taking advantage of the Intel Sandy “We use the partitioning technology to slice the FireHost also expects Dell Compellent Bridge processors and increasing our blade card’s aggregated 20 Gigabits into eight logical Dynamic Capacity thin provisioning software density. The two processors in a half-height network adapters. vSphere sees the network to reduce spending on storage as the M620 blade can handle 85 percent