Cloud Propeller, a leading MSP and premier IT solutions provider, chooses Violin All-Flash NVME storage to ensure performance, reliability and affordability of public cloud services.
Background
Founded in 2015 and based in Dublin, Ohio, Cloud Propeller develops tailored, enterprise-grade cloud infrastructure solutions for businesses, organizations, local government and academic institutions, including Dynalab, QStart Labs, DOmedia, Ohio Christian University, Alcohol Drug and Mental Health (ADAMH) Board of Franklin County, State of Ohio Richland County Auditor and many more.
Cloud Propeller is run by a team of dedicated, experienced engineers that provide Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Backup as a Service (BaaS), Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) and Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) to medium and large businesses. The company provides its services, on always up-to-date company-owned hardware, from data centers located in Dublin, Columbus and Cleveland.
“Cloud Propeller’s goal is to consistently invest in best-of-the-best technology which enables us to deliver public and private cloud services that compete with the large well-known public cloud providers, but in a more manageable, faster, affordable and trustworthy fashion,” said Petar Smilajkov, CEO and Chief Architect, Cloud Propeller.
The challenge
Applications are the operational heart of all Cloud Propeller clients, which run a wide variety of ERP, CRM, GL, OLAP, OLTP, ERM, BI and EDW workloads. Maintaining enterprise-class data protection, efficiency and easy-to-manage storage performance is therefore essential.
“Cloud Propeller’s diverse services roster includes enterprise infrastructure (IaaS) powered by VMware, backup services utilizing Veeam, Disaster Recovery (DR) with Zerto and virtual desktop (VDI) services with VMware and Nvidia, all of which run on our own infrastructure,” Smilajkov explained. “For us, storage is critical, as it is at the forefront of virtually everything we do – every service we deliver – every client capability we enable. For this reason, we continuously seek the best-of-the-best across every factor from reliability, scalability, performance and low-latency to affordability.”
The solution
Recently, Cloud Propeller decided it required a replacement solution for its VMware vSAN (virtual storage area network) hyperconverged infrastructure due to performance issues and other challenges. Cloud Propeller needed extremely reliable storage and initiated an evaluation of NVMe-backed vSAN, Tintri and Violin systems. After a thorough review, Violin emerged as the ideal solution – offering Cloud Propeller the most robust mix of features and functionality – chief among them the utmost reliability and performance.
“Not only was Violin the strongest offering, but it also came in at the best price by a significant factor,” said Smilajkov “We also really liked that Violin is an active/active system, whereas many of its competitors are active/passive. In other words, with Violin’s active-active controller design, both controllers are available to handle our critical operations.
“We read and write data to both controllers simultaneously, which doubles the theoretical and significantly increases the practical throughput of our storage array. As such, during firmware upgrades, there is no traditional ‘failover’ or IO pause. Rather, we only cut the available throughput in half during that time. And, if one controller fails, we immediately have access to the second controller without interruptions for performance and operations continuity.”
Today, the QV-Series Flash Storage Platform ensures consistent low latency data access and throughput for Cloud Propeller and its clients. It enables them to deploy critical applications with unrivaled data protection, efficiency and easy-to-manage storage performance to meet current and future business demands. Moreover, the QV-Series enables Cloud Propeller and its clients to deploy and run multiple large-scale enterprise applications in a flash.
“Bottom line, we have one offering (or tier) that caters to the customers that don’t necessarily need or care about performance, to those that must-have the best performance at all times and to those that want to have the ability to burst when necessary – and they all have to be equally happy and the price point has to be right for all,” said Smilajkov. “We figured out how to do this with compute a long time ago, but only Violin enables us to do this when it comes to storage.”
Not only a customer but a channel partner too
Having experienced Violin storage themselves, Cloud Propeller feels confident offering the solution to end customers, knowing the all-flash NVMe storage can easily optimize their customers’ business applications such as VMWare, Oracle, Microsoft and SAP while lowering overall IT costs.
Fast out of the gate, one of its first sales was to a local state government agency that needed to replace its aging storage. The client purchased two Violin storage arrays, which, having been set up and configured by Cloud Propeller, are now managed directly by the government client. If help is required, the client knows that they have a direct line to Cloud Propeller who will seamlessly provide assistance and deal directly with vendor support service, as their professional services supplier, if necessary.