MaSSSoftech

3PAR InServ Storage Servers Maximize Storage Capacity
Back in 2004, Cvent, a provider of meeting and event management SaaS offerings, had outstripped the 1.2TB capacity of its SAN. Its fast growth and rapid acquisition of customers was threatening to overwhelm its storage capacity, and the IT staff was spending a lot of time troubleshooting performance problems and trying to find additional space on its database.

“We couldn’t even grow volumes. We had to play games on the SAN to find additional space on our database,” says Dwayne Sye, CIO of Cvent. “That was all time we weren’t able to spend helping our customers.”

So Sye and others on the IT staff began evaluating possible replacements for the system. They knew they needed not only more storage space but also much faster performance. At the same time, however, they were concerned that any significant upgrade was likely to be both complex and time-consuming—and being a small, fast-growing company, Cvent didn’t have endless IT resources to spend on a complicated storage implementation, so manageability and ease of use were key requirements for any new system.

After looking at three vendors’ SAN products, Cvent opted to go with 3PAR’s InServ S400 storage server (www.3par.com), which has two or four controller nodes, up to 32GB of data cache, up to 640 drives, and a top storage capacity of 300TB. It also features RAID levels 0, 10, and 50.

Making SANs Simple

A key selling point of the InServ server, says Sye, was its administrative interface. The interface was designed to make configuring and changing drives and setting up the virtual SAN as quick and easy as possible.
“While it’s not extremely complicated stuff—creating volumes, exporting them, resisting, optimizing—it can seem pretty complicated and time-consuming. So the ability to do that so easily [on the InServ], especially compared to our old SAN, was what really sold me,” he says.

3PAR’s interface hides some of the complexity of configuring and administering storage by automating details that don’t really need a human to do, such as application provisioning and array planning and mapping. That automation, and the easy-to-understand interface, has saved Cvent substantially in IT administrative time, according to Sye.

Performance has also been very satisfactory, says Sye: “Now we don’t have performance problems with the disk subsystems. We don’t have to experience long query times to the database server—no bottlenecks.”

Saving Time & Effort

For Cvent, the Virtual Copy and Remote Copy functions of the 3PAR InForm software suite that accompanies the InServ have proved useful in reducing administrative time and headaches

Virtual Copy is 3PAR’s version of a snapshot that provides a quicker method of backing up data than the traditional one of copying the entire set of data. Virtual Copy allows Cvent to take quick snapshots of the data to be backed up on an incremental basis, thus reducing overall backup time substantially.

“We used that when our backup window approached eight hours. By using Virtual Copy, we made it virtually instantaneous,” says Sye.

Remote Copy is a host-independent, array-based data mirroring solution. 3PAR Virtual Volumes are mirrored from one 3PAR InServ server to another. Remote Copy, which Cvent uses to back up its corporate data, has helped reduce the time to recover lost information from an average of two weeks to two hours.

The InForm Suite also includes 3PAR’s Thin Provisioning capability, which automatically manages applications’ storage needs with a just-in-time approach. This differs from the traditional method of allocating space, wherein an administrator assigns large blocks of unused storage to each application for it to use as needed but that no other application can use. By employing Thin Provisioning, Cvent has been able to reduce its new storage capacity purchases by an estimated 95%.

Moving To T-Class

Cvent today has more than 4,500 clients, compared to just 45 when it first bought an InServ in 2004. So far, the scalability of the S400s, plus the optimization technologies it leverages, have provided Cvent with ample storage space. But given the growth rate of the firm and the associated growth in storage, Sye is considering an upgrade to 3PAR’s newest server, the T-Class array.

A big part of the appeal of the T-Class, says Sye, is that it offers administrators the ability to change volumes from fat to thin on the fly. So past decisions to use traditional “fat” provisioning—allocating a set amount of storage per application—for a volume can be changed if the administrator sees the need.

“I could deploy everything as thin or fat and then see how the volume gets utilized to decide if I need to change it,” says Sye, noting that being able to make use of these new types of storage optimization capabilities has also changed his way of looking at storage in general.