WebCentral arms itself for storage explosion

Web hosting company WebCentral is investing AU$1 million in new SAN, virtualisation and blade server technology to steel itself for exponential growth in data storage requirements.

WebCentral, now a subsidiary of ASX-listed domain registrar Melbourne IT, expects its storage under management to hit the one petabyte mark (one million gigabytes) within the next two years.

"The growth in storage is phenomenal," said Alec Lawson, CIO of Melbourne IT/WebCentral. "From a base of 250 terabytes of storage under management today, we project that in two years from now, we'll be managing 1.1 petabytes."

"We'll go from provisioning an extra 400 gigabytes a day to provisioning close to a terabyte a day," he said.

In preparing for this scale, the service provider has looked to maximise use of its existing storage using virtualisation software, as well as investing in new SAN (storage area network) technology to offer its customers more storage and disaster recovery options.

The company has invested in three Brocade 48000 director storage network switches, eight Brocade embedded switch fabric modules (installed within the blade server chassis) and two Brocade fabric switches for fibre-channel device aggregation.

The new network switches enable the team at WebCentral to view multiple SAN devices and networks as a single storage network across multiple sites -- two data centres in Brisbane and another in Sydney.

WebCentral chief infrastructure architect, Glenn Gore, said such measures are necessary to overcome the interoperability issues that continue to plague the data storage world.

"Fibre channel technology has matured a lot over the last six or seven years -- but there is still some way to go. The main issue is around what happens if you want to start mixing different storage networks together," he said.

As of April 2007, after extensive testing and pilot customer deployments, the company decided to make blade servers a de facto server platform for all its customers.

WebCentral currently maintains 10 blade chassis, running around 85 blade servers. "At current growth we are consuming a fully populated blade chassis every two weeks," Lawson said.

All for virtualisation
"These SAN switches are one component of a wider infrastructure refresh," said Lawson. "We are looking at a much denser network -- in terms of server virtualisation and blades -- while also being conscious of the environmental impact of our operations".

The environmental impact of server and storage virtualisation has recently been the subject of some debate.

Gore says WebCentral's example is proof that virtualisation can lead to lower power consumption.

"A virtualised server will always have far higher power consumption than a traditional one," he says. "It has eight or 10 times the memory, and quadruple the processing. That one virtualised server might be using three or four times the power consumption of the traditional server."

"But a well-tuned virtualised server can support more than the capacity of three or four traditional servers. We are achieving consolidation ratios of more like 10:1 and 20:1, not three or four to one. We're way out in front."

Gore says that those who accuse virtualised servers of using more power can't be achieving the right consolidation rates.

"There is a myth out there that virtualisation is easy," he said. "These solutions need to be properly tuned to get the availability and functionality right."

New services
The total infrastructure refresh, Lawson said, will enable the hosting provider to offer new services such as capacity-on-demand and campaign services.

Capacity-on-demand allows organisations that experience seasonal peaks in traffic -- such as entertainment, media and sporting sites -- to scale up and down to cater for bursts, while only paying for the services they need.

"Our virtualisation platform is a key aspect of this service as it enables us to more easily scale services up and down than in the past when we had to deploy physical servers to meet such demand," Lawson said.

Similarly, this flexibility allows Melbourne IT's customers the ability to launch large-scale, short-term marketing promotions in near real-time (days rather than weeks).

Lawson said that while the organisation's spending on storage was expensive, it was equally easy to justify because "there is immediately revenue coming in off the back of this infrastructure."

"It's harder for an enterprise to justify -- as on [their] balance sheet it's just seen as a cost."

Lawson said the company is now considering adding consulting services around the management of high density computing as an adjunct to some of its other services offerings.

"We don't see many too many people doing a good job of it," he said. "I don't want to blow our own trumpet, but we have made an investment in the kind of people that are very knowledgeable about this stuff."