Transitioning a Legacy Hosting Business to a Modern Virtualized Cloud Service Providing Business - Raffaello Poltronieri, Cloud Specialist, Clouditalia - Tintri session

1. Transitioning a Legacy Hosting Business to a Modern
Virtualized Cloud Service Providing Business
Raffaello Poltronieri
Cloud specialist

2.  Clouditalia overview
 2012 → 2015
 Storage evolution
 Company needs
 Market offering
 Solution adopted
 Results
 Future
Agenda

3. Clouditalia was born in 2012 from former Eutelia, acquiring its precious assets
in terms of people skills and network infrastructure.
Today Clouditalia is the first italian CSP that controls every step of its business
joining a proprietary network all across the Country including 14.000 Kms of
optical fibre with two next-generation Datacentres.

4. 2012 → 2015
• A brand new Datacenter in Milan
Telecity Group will join the existing
ones built in 2012
• A new 100Gbps backbone Milan –
Rome, latency: <15%
• Beside storage evolution, our
computing capacity increased of 50%
• Cloud services are in continue
development, expecially thanks to Tintri
in terms of QoS.

5. Storage evolution
Datacentres: solid but traditional NFS storage paradigm. A mix of
SAS, SATA and Flash (just for cache).
Performances and reliability at a good price.
That was the way to go for 2012.
Month by month customers growing in number and dimensions:
performances rapidly degrading.
That mix NOT enough anymore in performances terms, albeit still
reliable.
Maintenance renewal cost not affordable.

6. Storage evolution - 2
0
20
40
60
80
100
120
10 2012 03 2013 08 2013 01 2014 06 2014 11 2014 04 2015 8 2015
Perf
Cust
GB

7. Company needs
Customer evolution, moving SAP and SQL
–like application to the cloud: need for
PERFORMANCES.
Our virtual infrastructure required a daily
Storage vmotion
Main cause: SATA disks
New applications and more confidence in
our cloud moved more data inside our
datastores: storage CAPACITY low!
All these operations needed time and
skills: need for SIMPLICITY

8. Company needs - 2
Backup snapshot-based: SLOW and
HEAVY for production VMs
High density Datacenters make available
LITTLE SPACE, so every cm in Rack
Space is gold!
COST for direct and indirect energy, and
maintenance renewal.

9. Market offerings
A look to the market made us decide between:
• Traditional (Renew/Expansion of the current one)
• Traditional (New one)
• SDS (either All Flash or Hybrid)
Analysing our CSP dynamic environment, we found that
the challenge had to be between SDSs.
Tintri allows performance management, shows analytics
and reorders IOPS, all of these in a “per-VM” way.
Most Hybrid SANs write to spindle first and the SSD is
used for read cache, mostly a unprotected tier.
TINTRI uses a Flash first, writing to SSD first with SSD
protection. On top of this it do dedup and compression
on the fly

10. Solution Adopted
Traditional: too static. BUT We decided to give new life to
the existing arrays applying PernixData technology.
All Flash arrays: actually too expensive and not ever fitting
such dynamic environments.
Tintri is a great mix of performances due to SSD and
cheapness thanks to SAS disks.
Moreover, “Zero touch IT” once you’ve installed a TINTRI,
allows our company to save hundreds of specialist hours.

11. Results
• Setup speed
• Fast VMs moving from P.O.C. to production
• Physical GBs are x1,7 thanks to dedup and compression
• Dramatic reduction of ms latency per volume
• QoS
• V.I.P. customers
• New catalog item: “fast storage”
• TGCS GUI for global dashboard and analytics
• Comparison no more just €/Tb
Keep it simple!!

12. Future
Our goal is to move all of our storage capacity to Tintri.
The previous reasons that can justify this decision can be
further confirmed by a couple of considerations:
We almost didn’t have to ask for a P.O.C.: this means that
Tintri really believe in what they say and they sell.
Support: we received full support even during that P.O.C.
(that wasn’t due) and they took care of the issue in a
professional and responsible way, but above all, in a FAST
way.