When the six-year old social networking service hi5 doubled its user base in 2008, it became clear to management that a robust means of keeping pace with growth was called for. The 400+ TB of data the service manages just keeps growing, so the company looked to Sun for answers concerning their IT infrastructure. hi5 sought to scale its infrastructure to accommodate anticipated growth; reduce IT costs; provide for the management of hundreds of TBs of stored data; and maintain an easily scalable and manageable storage infrastructure. Sun came up with the answers.

The server of choice turned out to be the Sun Fire X4540 hybrid storage server, which enables hi5 to control its storage costs even as it manages the hundreds of TB of data its users create. This implementation reduced the cost per TB for data storage by more than 98% while enabling the company to achieve almost three times as much storage density as competitive solutions would have done.

Furthermore, the Sun solution provided a storage infrastructure that the company can scale easily to meet demand while at the same time reducing datacenter footprint by using 4U storage servers.

“Our biggest challenge is to rapidly scale a fairly moderate-sized infrastructure to keep up with growth, and yet not so rapidly that we’re crushed by it financially,” says Dan Peterson, vice president of technical operations at hi5. “We’re making significant, strategic changes in how we do things so that we can reduce our cost to service each user.”

Because, as Peterson notes, “We needed a vendor that could provide large amounts of dense storage at a very reasonable price,” hi5 turned to Sun for answers.

hi5 chose the hybrid Sun Fire X4540 server, a Sun Open Storage product that combines open source software with industry standard hardware to deliver unbeatable value. Known for its ability to run high-bandwidth applications, the Sun Fire X4540 server also provides speedy access to storage and unparalleled storage density in a 4U rack space. “The Sun Fire X4540 server can hold 48 raw terabytes of storage. You just won’t find that in a single chassis elsewhere; the most we could find was 18 drives,” says Peterson.

Sun's price point was also appealing to hi5, Peterson says, noting that, “With the Sun Fire X4540 server, there is no licensing fee. You can’t beat ‘none.’” When hi5 assessed the total cost of ownership for the Sun Fire X4540 Server, its three-year payback was astoundingly superior to any other solution. “Before it was costing us about $5,000 per terabyte to store data versus about $750 per terabyte now.” hi5 is so pleased with the Sun Fire X4540 servers that it plans to purchase ten more.

hi5 discovered that it was spending a disproportionately large amount of money on centralized storage. “In the past, we have predominantly used NetApp and 3Par for our high-performance database needs, but now that we have seen what the Sun Fire X4540 server has to offer, we are moving away from that centralized storage model for our ‘bulk’ storage purposes,” says Peterson. “We realized that probably 50% of our storage could be on this open, modular, scalable, Solaris-based system.” Peterson also points out that he can keep a tight reign on his budget by purchasing more Sun storage in 48-TB chunks rather than having to buy huge storage systems that are four or five times the price.

hi5 uses the Sun Fire X4540 servers with the Solaris 10 Operating System primarily to store data. According to Peterson, ”We take advantage of the fact that the Sun Fire X4540 servers are a big pool of storage. We see these servers as the building blocks of a distributed file system, and we use a lot of the native Solaris features of ZFS for replication and availability. Solaris is an awesome operating system — it’s modern. In terms of reliability, it’s rock solid. The kernel doesn’t lock up. While Linux is still trying to catch up, Solaris is already a very mature operating system.”

More Information

Sun Fire X4540 Server [...read more...]

		fullsource
Print Email Current Profile Archive Blog Generate newsletter