Transcript
A direct flight to ROI with HP 3PAR storage Skyscanner doubles the number of concurrent users it can accommodate while improving performance and reducing storage costs
“Since virtualizing our front-end production infrastructure on VMware and HP 3PAR storage, we have already reduced the cost to serve a session by 20 to 30 percent. That improves our bottom line.” —Phil Dalbeck, Infrastructure Architect, Skyscanner Ltd
Objective Improve agility and scalability of IT infrastructure to support rapid growth while keeping costs under control
Approach Virtualize and standardize the server environment and evaluate virtualized storage solutions
IT improvements • 75 percent less disk capacity required with thin provisioning, lowering storage costs
HP customer case study: HP 3PAR storage enables twofold more concurrent users, better performance, and lower costs
Industry: travel
• 40 percent decrease in rack footprint, simplifying management and reducing costs • Replication-ready SAN, simplifying disaster recovery and improving business continuity
Business benefits • Able to accommodate twice as many concurrent user sessions with improved performance, building customer loyalty • 20 to 30 percent reduction in cost to serve a session, improving profitability • 40 percent less power usage at primary data center
Searching fast, flying cheap “Watch the skies. Everywhere. Keep looking. Keep watching the skies.” Science fiction movie buffs will undoubtedly recognize this famous line from the 1951 classic, The Thing From Another World. To the crew of Polar Expedition Six, however, a multilingual flight search engine that lets users compare rates and find the cheapest flights in minutes would have been nearly as surprising as flying saucers. Skyscanner Ltd, an Edinburgh-based online travel search firm founded in 2001, is the fastest-growing privately owned technology company in Scotland. Skyscanner compares flight prices from thousands of airlines, allowing customers to find the cheapest fares.
About Skyscanner Ltd Skyscanner is Europe’s leading flight-search website and the fastest-growing privately owned technology company in Scotland.
Scaling to meet demand
Virtual storage for virtual servers
To accommodate “burst traffic” and provide a seamless end-user experience, Skyscanner requires a flexible and agile IT infrastructure. But by 2010, the company was experiencing challenges typical of a startup that grew quickly. A mixed data center environment with a purely physical production infrastructure did not provide the scalability the company required to remain competitive and keep costs under control.
To meet these challenges, Skyscanner decided to virtualize its entire front-end, customer-facing infrastructure, building a new private cloud using VMware vSphere 4.1 Enterprise Plus. Dalbeck then set about finding the right virtualized storage solution to support the virtual machines (VMs).
“We’re constantly working to improve service, and we’ve been fortunate to see rapid growth,” says Phil Dalbeck, infrastructure architect at Skyscanner. “But we were starting to pay a high price on the IT side in order to support that growth. We had racks and racks of physical equipment in production that was evergrowing and getting difficult to manage. We needed to be able to scale out at the same rate as our session traffic is growing, and not be forced into making the wrong decisions about what technologies to utilize.”
“Shared, virtualized storage is absolutely key in order to get the most benefit from server virtualization,” says Dalbeck. “It goes along with the whole concept of the private cloud—a pool of disk capacity and compute resources that can grow easily and assign where needed. Everybody talks about virtualizing servers, but you also need to virtualize your storage in order to gain optimal flexibility.”
Finding the right tool for the job
Skyscanner evaluated HP 3PAR, EMC, and Dell EqualLogic storage systems as potential candidates. “We were looking for the solution that would scale If Skyscanner had suffered a major server or storage up and out simply and affordably as the hosting failure at its primary data center in London, Dalbeck requirements of our environment grow over the next notes, wait times could have become lengthy, and user couple of years. After a detailed investigation, we sessions could have been interrupted. “We didn’t want decided that the EMC and EqualLogic options on to risk losing revenue or customer loyalty,” he explains. the table weren’t the best choice for us given our “We’re a Web 2.0 business, so our business is entirely workload and project goals,” says Dalbeck. “It was Web-based. Downtime or poor performance would all about finding the right tool for the job, and for have a huge impact on the market’s perception of our the production-strength performance we needed, company. We needed an infrastructure that would HP 3PAR was the best fit. We’re virtualizing a huge allow us to be proactive instead of reactive.” and varied workload, and it’s all underpinned by our HP 3PAR T400 Storage System. The wide-striping architecture allows us to make the best use of all the hardware in our box regardless of how our workloads “Being able to convert between different storage change over the lifetime of the equipment. In terms tiers while the data is still online is a major boon. The of manageability, the user interface of the HP 3PAR performance impact was impressive, and we were system is very clear and concise. That really means able to achieve much greater densities.” a lot to my engineers when they’re provisioning and —Phil Dalbeck, Infrastructure Architect, Skyscanner Ltd doing performance analysis.”
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Twice as many concurrent users— with better performance With a new front-end production infrastructure comprising more than 300 VMs, Skyscanner can accommodate twice as many concurrent user sessions as before, with improved performance. That performance is achieved as cost-effectively as possible, since HP 3PAR Adaptive Optimization software automatically moves virtual machine workloads between Fibre Channel and SATA disk, depending on I/O requirements. “Being able to convert between different storage tiers while the data is still online is a major boon,” says Dalbeck. “The performance impact of those optimization routines was particularly impressive, and we were able to achieve much greater densities than expected for our lower I/O VMs by hosting them on the cost-effective SATA tier.”
Customer solution at a glance Hardware • HP 3PAR T400 Storage System Software • HP 3PAR Adaptive Optimization • HP 3PAR Thin Provisioning • VMware vSphere 4.1 Enterprise Plus Operating systems • CentOS Linux 5.6 • Microsoft® Windows® Server 2008, 2003 Network protocols • Gigabit Ethernet • Fibre Channel Services from HP • HP Proactive 24 (P24)
20 to 30 percent less cost to serve a session
Skyscanner’s virtualization efforts have reduced the rack space required to host the production infrastructure by 40 percent, and power usage has dropped by the same amount. “We’ve lowered our Virtualizing on HP 3PAR storage has also reduced carbon footprint, and we’re able to serve twice as costs. By using HP 3PAR Thin Provisioning to create many sessions out of the same data center,” says a single pool of storage from which capacity is dedicated only as data is actually written to the drives, Dalbeck. “All told, since virtualizing our front-end production infrastructure on VMware and HP 3PAR Skyscanner has reduced the amount of disk capacity storage, we have already reduced the cost to serve a required to support its production infrastructure by session by about 20 to 30 percent. That improves our 75 percent. “Thin provisioning was massive for us,” bottom line.” says Dalbeck. “We didn’t have to overprovision disks just to be sure we would have enough storage for the lifespan of the server.”
75 percent less storage capacity required
HP 3PAR takes a reservationless, dedicate-on-write approach to thin provisioning that enables the platform’s thin software applications to draw and configure capacity in fine-grained increments from a single free space reservoir, without pre-dedication of any kind. While other storage vendors claim to offer thin provisioning, many require separate thin provisioning pools for each data service level. These pools are really just silos of allocated-but-unused capacity that can require manual setup, provisioning, and management, which impact thin provisioning ROI and flexibility.
“It was about finding the right tool for the job, and for the production-strength performance we needed, HP 3PAR was the best fit.” —Phil Dalbeck, Infrastructure Architect, Skyscanner Ltd
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Simplified replication, no forklift upgrades Skyscanner is preparing to deploy further HP 3PAR storage systems at separate locations for disaster recovery purposes. “We’ll be able to replicate data over the WAN with a few mouse clicks using HP 3PAR Remote Copy software,” says Dalbeck. “That means that our systems administrators can do the job rather than having to engage dedicated SAN specialists, as would probably have been the case had we selected another storage platform.”
No compromises As Skyscanner reaches cruising altitude, virtualizing on HP 3PAR storage has smoothed the ride. “We have been able to put a lot more onto a lot less and at the same time improve the performance of our services,” says Dalbeck. “We haven’t had to compromise in any way.”
Not having to compromise on technology means that Skyscanner can keep watching the skies for more and more customers. “Our traffic is increasing all the time,” Dalbeck concludes. “We need to be able to react in minutes or hours, not weeks or months. Using HP 3PAR As Skyscanner expands, it will not face “forklift” upgrades, since HP 3PAR storage is designed to scale storage to support our private cloud has given us seamlessly as virtual environments grow. “I’m confident that flexibility. Our investment in a fully virtualized infrastructure started paying dividends immediately. that as we purchase more HP 3PAR hardware, it will The cost savings, improvements in performance, integrate smoothly with the equipment we already have in place,” says Dalbeck. “And as current models workload flexibility, simplified management, and reduced future expansion costs mean that our are designed to be future compatible with new investment in a private cloud infrastructure has already versions of the hardware, we get the most from our been a success. We are seeing tangible benefits investment by maintaining a common management across the board already. We don’t have to wait until interface across all our storage.” a theoretical date in the future to start seeing ROI.” The ability to perform proactive maintenance is also very important to Skyscanner. “The automated call-home and preemptive failure alert features of HP 3PAR give us real peace of mind,” says Dalbeck. “Being able to allocate parts and engineering time in advance of a potential hardware issue is massively valuable to us as a business. In addition, HP Proactive 24 service automatically reports any hardware or misconfiguration issues and dispatches the required parts or HP engineers, minimizing any potential business impact.”
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