Code Monkey Studios Ltd is a Software Solutions Company specializing in Location services chooses Open-E JovianDSS for their data storage solution. Code Monkey writes and runs solutions for companies around the globe, and hosts it all on their own DataCenter. In total, the company has around 100 000 devices reporting in every 30 seconds throughout the day with the location data.
Technical and business goals- To create a cost-effective solution to centrally serve virtual machines.
- To prepare a fast, reliable, and redundant storage backed by SSDs.
- To create a highly redundant, flexible, and easy to use solution.
- To make a solution that works together with VMware ESXi.
Why Open-E?
After performing initial tests, the Code Monkey’s Team was impressed with the ease and simplicity of the setup, as well as the error-free usage of Open-E JovianDSS with VMware ESXi. The fact that Open-E does not constrain the company to any specific hardware and allows to use commodity parts was also a huge plus. Code Monkey was able to implement a resilient storage solution of their choice which otherwise would be a costly operation when taking into account other vendors’ offers.
When looking at the solutions from other vendors it was all tied into them, their service and support packages, and if anything went wrong, we would have to wait for them, there would be nothing we could really do. In addition their costs were so much, we wouldn’t be able to go for a hugely redundant solution, and we would be relying on the expensive support to sort our issues if any arose.
VMware Ready
One of the key objectives for Code Monkey was to find a cost-effective solution that works alongside VMware ESXi to centrally serve the virtual machines with fast, reliable, and redundant storage which was fully backed by SSDs.
Code Monkey is now able to utilise all functions of VMware ESXi which the company couldn’t use before, such as DRS and quick migration of virtual machines between hosts. The host maintenance is quick and easy now as there is no need to wait for gigabytes of data to be migrated off hosts. The company is really happy with the performance results achieved by Open-E JovianDSS and they are really pleased to be able to use VMware ESXi to its fullest potential.
Metro High Availability Failover Cluster Solution
Initially, a single node of Open-E JovianDSS was prepared and ran flawlessly for 12 months without a single second of downtime. Since then the company decided to upgrade a single node to a Metro High Availability Failover Cluster, for the ultimate peace of mind. The new solution so far has been running without any issues as well.
Additionally, Code Monkey is no longer limited by the host storage capacity thanks to Open-E JovianDSS. Before implementing the Open-E solution, each host would need identical disk setups and plenty of disks to accommodate its normal workload on virtual machines plus additional space when there was a need to temporarily move virtual machines onto the host when placing other virtual machines offline for maintenance.
Currently, the company can have minimal disk capacity on all hosts, which moving forward, reduces costs as they don’t need to populate expensive disks or high-end storage controllers in the Code Monkey’s hosts.
Thanks to the Metro High Availability Failover cluster, in case of emergency, the second node can be used to begin the failover operation if there is a need to do so.
100% satisfied with the solution, the system stability is 100%, we have not yet had a second of downtime since we installed our first Open-E Server in April 2020, and since we upgraded this to be a Metro High Availability Failover cluster it would need multiple failures across multiple hosts to be in risk of being corrupted. I love how we can move the storage from one node to another, and reboot the hosts if needed, it’s really slick.
The biggest advantages
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Management
Code Monkey is now able to utilize functions of ESXi that were previously unavailable for them such as DRS and quick migration of virtual machines between hosts.
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Growth
The company is no longer limited by the host storage capacity. Before the implementation of Open-E JovianDSS, each host would need identical disk setups and lots of them to accommodate its workload of a virtual machine and additional space required for placing it offline.
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Peace of mind
With a central storage solution, the company can be rest assured that the storage won’t become corrupt or have a hardware issue and it should be easier to proceed with a failover operation in case ESXi host becomes corrupt.
Hardware details
| Configuration | |
|---|---|
| Server: | 2 x Dell R720 Servers |
| Chassis: | 2U* |
| Motherboard: | Dell R720 |
| Power supply: | 2x 750W PSU |
| Processor: | 2x Intel ® Xeon ® 2650 V24 Cores – 8 Threads |
| RAM: | 256 GB DDR3 1866 Mhz |
| RAID: | Open-E Mirror Groups, no hardware RAID |
| HBA: | 2 x H730P controllers |
| Network connection: | 6 x 10GB NIC & 2 x 1Gb NIC |
| Boot: | 2 x 200 GB SATA SSD Software RAID 1 |
| Write Log: | None |
| Read Cache | None |
Storage configuration
| JBOD: | 11 x 1.92TB SAS & 5 x 3.84TB SAS JBOD |
| zPool: | 10x 1.92 TB in Mirror Groups + 1x Hot Spare, 4x 3.84TB in Mirror Groups + 1x Hot Spare |
| iSCSI Multipathing: |
R720 Server 1
R720 Server 2
2 x 10GB NIC in Active/Failover between hosts directly connected |
| Storage capacity: | 16 TB |
| Software: | |
|---|---|
| 2x | Open-E JovianDSS Basic License |
| 1x | Open-E JovianDSS Storage Extension 16TB |
| 1x | Open-E JovianDSS Advanced Metro HA Cluster Feature Pack |
| 2x | Premium Support - 3 Years from Open-E |
| Virtualization: | |
|---|---|
| Hosts: | VMware ESXi |
| Virtualization device: | ESXi iSCSi software adapter - VMFS Datastores |
The company owns and runs its own infrastructure, outsourcing only the DataCenter component of where the systems are hosted.