4D-DC Introduces New Cloud Solution Based on Infortrend’s Storage

4D-DC Introduces New Cloud Solution Based on Infortrend’s Storage

4D-DC is an independent UK data centre and ISP with a successful cloud platform. It recently launched a new cloud service platform (4D Cloud 2.0), redesigned from the ground up after thoroughly reviewing its services in order to best match the requirements of its clients and their cloud requirements. The main differences with the new cloud platform are on the storage side, which is provided by Infortrend.

A 10Gb/s SAN Structure for 200 VMs and 4 Million Peak IOPS

4D Cloud 2.0 was built on a 10Gb/s iSCSI throughput SAN infrastructure, including Dell servers, Brocade switches and Infortrend EonStor DS RAID storages. The purpose of the redesign is to offer an ultimate cloud hosting solutions in terms of flexibility, security, speed and ease of use. With 1 million peak IOPS and 40 VMs initially, 4D-DC anticipates that the growth will be over 4 million peak IOPS and 200 VMs within the first year. To meet such huge demands, the main technical challenge is to expand easily and rapidly whenever the scalable demand is there, while maintaining performance and resilience – these demands are met by Infortrend EonStor DS storage solutions.

Automated Storage Tiering Ensures Performance and Resilience

Due to the nature of cloud services, 4D Cloud 2.0 has a wide range of clients and applications running with the VMs, applications such as SQL databases, telephone systems to video streaming. In this case, Infortrend storage has a very important mandate: to deliver a wide variety of solutions. The automated storage tiering provided by Infortrend EonStor DS, better utilizes the different type of hard drives (SSD, SAS , NL-SAS). This allows 4D Cloud 2.0 to satisfy clients that require high speed storage access, while being economic to others who just want to store data for backup purposes.

Easy/Simplicity of Storage Interface Combined with Services

It is definitely not an easy project to deploy. A huge and complex new cloud platform, with a joint effort between all 4D-DC’s technical teams, technical operations team, networking and support teams and support from Infortrend. For 4D-DC, they may easily have gone to another storage provider that offered similar features. In the end, Infortrend came out on top not only because of raw hardware firepower but also because of ease and simplicity of management interface coupled with excellent pre / post sales support.

More about Infortrend EonStor DS 3016

High availability dual controller 3U 16-bay storage designed for powerful yet simple enterprise service in SAN applications. It has the following benefits:

• Up to 1.3M IOPS and 5,500 Mbps throughput
• Up to an extra 316 drives via Infortrend expansion enclosures
• Easy upgradable host interface module - 8Gb/s or 16Gb/s Fibre Channel, 1Gb/s or 10Gb/s iSCSI, or 6Gb/s or 12Gb/s SAS based on your needs and budget
• Hybrid hosts for diverse environments on one system, e.g. Fibre Channel/SAS and onboard iSCSI
• Rich data services – storage tiering, SSD cache, thin provisioning, remote replication…

Infortrend Automated Storage Tiering

By enabling users to flexibly assign applications to four available tiers distinguished by different drive types and RAID levels, automated storage tiering provides an architecture that fully leverages the advantages of different storage media, including SSDs for high-performance data storage. With automated storage tiering, users can greatly optimize storage performance and increase ROI.