ACESI Group’s Platinum All-Flash Storage Leasing Services

Business Benefits

Business Challenges

In the age of cloud and flash, ever-increasing data volumes make timely service response difficult. Customers have demanding performance and data protection requirements for IT leasing services, which cannot be met by traditional IT architectures. To meet these requirements, many ISP companies are in urgent need of transformation.

Transformation

With Huawei’s All-Flash Data Acceleration Solution, ACESI develops platinum-level storage leasing services to deliver quality cloud and Virtual Machine (VM) leasing services for customers. Flash-based data reduction helps customers reduce their Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) by 50 percent while remaining highly competitive. ACESI currently plans to migrate all of their services from cloud storage to Huawei OceanStor Dorado V3 all-flash storage.

Striving for Excellence

As the largest cloud hosting service provider in the eastern part of France, ACESI provides quality, stable, and reliable storage leasing services for governments and healthcare companies in Europe and North America. Ever-increasing data volumes make timely service response difficult. Customers have demanding performance and data protection requirements for IT leasing services, which cannot be met by traditional IT architectures. To meet such requirements, many ISP companies are in urgent need of transformation. ACESI strives to increase their competitive strength by working with Huawei to make some changes to their storage systems.

Developing Platinum-Level Storage Leasing Services Based on All-Flash Storage

Customers of different sizes have different storage leasing requirements. To address these demands, ACESI provides customers with different levels of storage services. Storage leasing services are divided into three levels (gold, silver, and bronze) based on storage space, latency, Input/output Operations Per Second (IOPS), and data protection capability. This allows ACESI to meet the requirements of healthcare companies and governments of all sizes while further winning their trust.

However, since the start of 2016, more and more of ACESI’s customers found that the existing services could not fulfill their business development needs. This is because legacy storage systems were heavily strained by increasing data volumes brought about by the growth of big data applications, and could not deliver the performance that was required. Customers demanded higher-level storage services, especially those that can ensure latency shorter than 1 ms.

After several failed attempts to meet customers’ requirements (including upgrading existing IT solutions and establishing new all-flash solutions), ACESI started to take notice of the all-flash Huawei OceanStor Dorado V3 Data Acceleration Solution during its procurement process. It is the only all-flash solution on the market to offer the end-to-end optimization for storage operating systems, chips, and SSDs, made possible by the Huawei’s ability to develop all such components. Huawei FlashLink^TM enables controllers to intelligently sense the data layout in SSD disks, make the I/O priority adjustments, and reshuffle data to offer a truly service-driven approach to orchestration. FlashLink^TM achieves optimum performance from storage controllers and SSD disks, allowing the Dorado V3 to reach up to 4 million IOPS with 0.5 ms stable low latency. In real-life tests, 100 VMware VMs were deployed on Dorado V3 all-flash storage. The time to roll out new services was shortened from 30 minutes to 10 minutes, which was much faster than ACESI’s expectations. With 0.5 ms stable latency and 6,000 IOPS/TB performance provided by the OceanStor Dorado V3, ACESI offers platinum-level storage leasing services to quickly respond to users’ requests even at peak hours while offering quality services and improving satisfaction. Dorado also provides linear scalability in performance and capacity, which matches ACESI’s plan for future business expansion.

Complete Data Protection Solution Meets Various Customer Demands

In addition to focusing on storage capacity and local data protection services, tenants require reliable data protection services. For example, customers in the healthcare industry want 99.9999% data protection services. However, neither ACESI’s existing remote replication solution nor a higher-level data protection solution could meet customer needs.

ACESI ultimately chose Huawei’s OceanStor Dorado V3 all-flash storage. Huawei’s Gateway-Free HyperMetro-based Active-Active Solution hosts database resource pools of core services to achieve active-active mirroring with load balancing and cross-site takeover without interrupting services, all while ensuring 99.9999% availability and shorter than 1 ms stable latency. ACESI provides platinum-level storage leasing services to meet the needs of its most demanding customers. The remote replication solution accommodates VM storage pools to enable batch VM migration and data protection, and provides different tiers of storage leasing services lower than the platinum level. Database and VM storage pools leverage snapshots without compromising performance to provide efficient data backup. Huawei’s Dorado V3 all-flash storage provides complete data protection solution meets various customer needs.

Efficient Operations Enable Highly Competitive Operations

Maximizing revenues and minimizing costs to achieve the best possible overall profit is every business goal. Deduplication and compression are an optimal tool for ACESI to lower operational costs while remaining highly competitive. Huawei OceanStor Dorado V3’s inline deduplication and compression provides at least a 3:1 data reduction ratio without affecting performance. This means that Dorado V3 only needs 25 x 900 GB SSDs to accomplish what 120 x 1.2 TB SAS disks can do, reducing storage space by 72%, energy consumption by 64%, and end-to-end TCO by 47%. ACESI can offer efficient storage services to stay ahead of the competition.

Dorado V3 provides a wizard-driven Graphics User Interface or GUI-based management page to simplify Operations and Maintenance (O&M). Its management and monitoring capability over the service life of a single SSD is the best in the industry. To ensure effortless service migration, Dorado V3 is compatible with over 300 mainstream storage systems and 98% of IT infrastructures, and can migrate services without affecting user experience. Convenient management operations enable ACESI engineers to quickly understand how to operate and maintain Dorado V3, which greatly lowers learning costs and enhances operational efficiency.