Global publishing firm exceeds SLAs with scale-out flash storage

Agora Publishing, a global holding company for various publishers of financial, health, travel, and special interest books and newsletters, has built greater scalability, reliability and operational efficiency into its virtualisation infrastructure by deploying Coraid EtherFlash™, a scale-out, all-flash Ethernet storage solution.

  • 11 years ago Posted in

Agora Publishing has 24 affiliates and subsidiaries located in eight different countries. As a global publishing house, Agora is faced with management and cost-of-ownership challenges associated with its growing volume of electronic data. To address these mounting challenges, the company moved away from its previous legacy scale-up storage infrastructure to a 10-Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) storage solution that uses Coraid EtherFlash, a modular, scale-out, all-flash storage appliance based on solid-state drives.


“We needed a better way to manage our data,” said Jason Pell, CIO for Agora Publishing. “Coraid provided us with a solution that better positions my team to meet the company’s evolving storage needs. The combination of Coraid scale-out flash storage and Ethernet helped us deliver on a number of operational goals such as improved performance, scalability and reliability.”


Coraid EtherFlash is a storage solution bundle that combines high-performance flash drives with the massively parallel scale-out architecture of Coraid EtherDrive® to provide superior performance for I/O-intensive applications. Coraid EtherDrive block storage solutions offer flexible building blocks for cloud-scale storage deployments. EtherDrive leverages a connectionless Layer-2 storage networking fabric and software intelligence to aggregate commodity hardware resources and manage them as a pooled resource.


EtherDrive offers customers the flexibility to deploy any mix of SSD, SAS and SATA drives in a single array, based on their evolving requirements, and to add appliances to expand capacity and performance. For example, a high-end Web application could leverage 24 or 36 SSDs in a single array, while a VDI environment might combine 6 SSDs for shared boot images with 30 SATA drives for high-capacity file storage. EtherDrive also provides the ability to accelerate I/O performance with highly customisable flash-based caching.


Applications like databases, email and analytics require a very high number of IOPS; meeting these requirements with spinning media such as SAS or SATA disk drives is often prohibitively expensive. A typical 15K SAS drive provides approximately 200 IOPS, while a flash drive (SSD) is orders of magnitude faster. Flash storage delivers outstanding performance, greater reliability and significant power savings while providing the industry’s highest IOPS per dollar.

 


 

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