First Technology’s Hosting Manager, Darryl Glass, realized that its business had fundamentally changed. First Technology could no longer cobble together piecemeal technology solutions or spend time troubleshooting back-end support issues. It had to focus on delivering technology solutions to new clients knowing that its data center could scale to meet these demands and then support them. To make this change from cobbled together technologies to a cost-effective and supported scale-out solution, Glass recognized that his first step involved identifying the right partner who had the right suite of solutions to meet his company’s needs.
First Technology delivers IT products and services that support business-critical infrastructures and processes for organizations of all sizes and across multiple industries in South Africa. Within, First Technology, Darryl Glass had the hosting responsibility for managing the division, driving new technology, providing high end consulting, doing solution designs and advancing First Technology’s services. The last thing he wanted was to also handle every support issue that came up.
First Technology provides cloud hosting services that range from entry level virtual servers up to enterprise cloud solutions. When First Technology had just a few customers, Glass functioning as the primary person to do support worked satisfactorily.
However as First Technology’s number of clients under management grew, he could no longer be the only one responsible for supporting the First Technology data center. To change that while also simplifying the environment, he recognized that he needed to standardize the hardware and software that was deployed.
As part of this standardization initiative, Glass wanted more than just a reseller of hardware and software. He needed a partner who would have a vested interest in First Technology’s ongoing success. Glass notes, “We did not want someone to just come in and sell us hardware and then walk away.”
As he evaluated prospective partners, he also looked at available solutions. Of particular interest to him was putting in place a flexible and scalable storage model. He was tired of the “scale down” approach where every few years he had to replace gear that was either out of warranty or at end of life. The right partner for First Technology was the one who could deliver and support a scale-out model.
First Technology Finds a Scale-out Partner in Dell
As a company that had long done business with Dell, Glass recognized that Dell was evolving to provide and support a complete end-to-end data center solution that encompassed servers, networking, storage and even backup. This strategy mapped exactly to First Technology’s goal of resolving its support issues while putting in place a standardized infrastructure that would give it a foundation to grow its top line business.
Particularly appealing to Glass was the Dell EqualLogic storage line and its scale-out architecture. Using EqualLogic, First Technology would get the flexibility to start small and then scale it out to meet it future storage capacity and performance demands. These benefits in mind, First Technology selected Dell as its preferred partner to provide hardware and software for its data center and then support it.
The first step in the project was to standardize on Dell hardware for its applications. First Technology replaced its existing rack-mounted servers with Dell blade technology, its networking infrastructure with 10Gb Dell Ethernet switches and its storage arrays with the Dell EqualLogic PS6110 series.
Dell EqualLogic’s scale-out architecture turned out to be particularly beneficial. First Technology initially started out with just a few PS6110 models in one logical cluster that had about 70 TBs of capacity. However it anticipates that it will nearly double the amount of capacity under management in the months to come. Using its scale-out functionality, this will occur without any increase in workload.
The scale-out functionality also comes into play as First Technology builds out a disaster recovery (DR) site. While all of its EqualLogic PS6110 arrays are in production now, in the future it can retire older individual arrays from the cluster and then move them to the DR site.
Finally, the performance of the EqualLogic PS6110 has surpassed First Technology’s expectations even as it lowered its storage costs. Glass has found running iSCSI over Dell’s 10Gb Ethernet switches to be much more cost effective and flexible than running Fibre Channel (FC) throughout the data center.
This 10Gb Ethernet connectivity coupled with the PS6110’s scale-out capabilities has resulted in an overall improvement in the performance of its clients’ applications. Glass says, “Performance for SQL Server and Exchange has been great. As First Technology scales out the EqualLogic PS6110, application performance improves.”
The second and final part of this 2-part blog series wll examine how Dell also provided First Technology with a better way to do backup and ultimately help to remove many of the technology hassles associated with managing First Technology’s data center.