Premium MSP infrastructure offered by VMhosts through Vesper’s new Intel and DataCore all Flash appliance

Michael Custance, Senior Virtualisation Consultant at VMhosts details. “This was a migration to secure future flexibility and service levels for our customers and provide granular control that our existing arrays simply could not offer.  Our go-to technology provider, Vesper, suggested that we stretch test their new Vesper Intel based appliance overlaid with DataCore’s Software Defined Storage (SDS) to give us the flex we need, now and in the foreseeable future.”

Vesper’s successful proposal to run customer Virtual Machines (VMs) alongside Vesper’s SDS pre-enabled and integrated storage appliances offered a logical cost-effective path to meeting uptime levels. Regardless of size, VMhosts customers universally have one desire; minimal downtime across trading hours. Some customers require a continual 24x7 trading window (such as an insurance company trading in both UK and Australia) so VMhosts have to be certain of meeting their 99.95% SLA for customer uptime. Detailed stretch testing proved the required availability levels – and more.    

One Stop For Seamless Rollout and Ongoing Support:

Rollout of two x 25TB Vesper All Flash appliances in the Enfield data centre commenced in Spring. Onsite installation was fast and trouble-free as the hardware and software were fully integrated pre-install. For continued single point of assurance, Vesper continue to provide VMhosts with a single line of support.

Increased performance was the first notable winner. After install, client application response times increased 10 fold due to the blistering combination of Intel® Optane™ as tier 1 storage backed by an all Intel NVMe capacity tier to guarantee extreme data throughput layered with DataCore’s caching algorithms and the software’s unique parallel I/O architecture. One knock-on effect of the set and forget performance boost sits within VMhosts own benchmarking environment - the ultimate test bed for perspective new customers. The new extreme platform performance has become a showcase to convince these prospective customers just how fast their data could be served - directly delivering ROI for the company.

Scale-Up, Scale-Out, Vesper’s Ultimate Flex right for the VMhosts Service Model:

With a pay as you grow licencing model, the Vesper appliances offer VMhosts the ultimate scale and flex platform, easily adding individual disks as needed via the DataCore management GUI. This flex is critical to MSPs providing customers with in-built reassurance that should their needs spike, VMhosts’ MSP infrastructure can ably cope. For instance, one well-known VMhosts Not-for-Profit customer hosts a famous annual fundraising day in the UK when  £ millions of transactions and contributions are processed within a 24-hour period.

Michael elaborates further - “We had come from a fairly restricted environment when it came to carving up storage space and provisioning extra disk, so the addition of SDS suddenly offered us the ultimate management layer, right here at our fingertips. Meaning when we are now asked for an extra 10TB of storage we can confidently state, “No problem, it’s just a few clicks away.”

The software licencing model also serves VMhosts well, starting low and building, paying only for the data that is presented to VMware rather than paying for multiple copies of data offered in other subscriptions. The HA two node configuration also reduces Capex as most high-availability platforms require at least three, or sometimes four nodes, to start.