The California Public Utilities Commission has installed all-flash SolidFire storage to handle its most latency-sensitive applications, in a quest to reduce its data center footprint.
The regulator had an 80 percent server virtualization before adding SolidFire storage to the mix—six years after implementing a virtualization strategy.
"We were about 75 to 80 percent virtualized, and that was it,” said CPUC infrastructure manager Albert Fuller, in a case study. “I said, 'I can't go on. There are databases that I can't really virtualize.'"
That included its Microsoft (News - Alert) SQL server database. Also, a 300-seat virtual desktop license for VMware Horizon wasn’t being used because its existing infrastructure could only support around 30 desktops.
"We've always used legacy storage -- Dell, NetApp, we used to have EMC," Fuller said. "We had all SAS (News - Alert) drives on them. I tried to buy flash from them, but they wanted me to pay not just my right arm, but my left arm and part of my head. We're the government; we're supposed to be frugal."
Fuller said that he wanted a scale-out architecture that spreads capacity over nodes rather than a scale-up setup that uses a fixed controller system.
"Believe me, I've been beaten by scale-up," he said. "We had a major incident with an old EMC CLARiiON array that we bought from Dell (News - Alert). We lost one of the array [controllers]. If you lose that with scale-up, you're dead. We were down for about two weeks. So when any vendor said 'scale-up,' I said 'Heck no. No more scale-up.'"
After some research, CPUC bought two four-node SolidFire SF2405 clusters, placing one cluster in the data center and the other in a disaster recovery site. Each cluster has around 35 TB of effective flash capacity. Fuller said he started out virtualizing SQL on the all-flash system.
"That went well, performance-wise. We heard no complaints from users," he said, so his team added Horizon View virtual desktops to the SolidFire cluster next.
So far, Fuller has been able to expand its 30 virtual desktops to 80, beginning with developers, consultants and remote workers.
Edited by Rory J. Thompson