The Challenge

Matthew Meyer of K5 Technologies was looking for a solution that was cost-effective, scalable, redundant, and exhibited excellent performance. Additionally, K5 Technologies was focused on reducing the power usage from their existing servers in an effort lower their carbon footprint. At the time, K5 Technologies was using VMware ESX Infrastructure that comprised of six servers using direct attached storage. Matthew stated that this limited their ability to get all of the enterprise features that VMware offers such as VMotion, DRS, and HA.

Enhance Technology became part of the solution

Set up of the volumes were quick and easy to present the LUNs to the servers. For Matthew, the GUI was very easy to understand and navigate. After presenting the LUN, Matthew used VMware Storage VMotion to move the VMs to the SAN without distruption. Matthew stated: “We were on the SAN in under a week.”

Everything worked perfectly. Matthew and K5 Technologies originally had six servers with six drives each. They have since then gone diskless on the servers and reduced the number of drives from 36 to 8. Now there is more capacity, fewer spindles, fewer chances of failure, and lowered power consumption from utilizing high-capacity SATA drives. Matthew also found the speed impressive. “The unit was able to achieve near line speeds (~110MB/s), even when using RAID-6.”

The Design

UltraStor RS8 IP is a 2U, 8 SATA disks that feature two GbE ports (iSCSI). With an intelligent iSCSI RAID system and runs 10 times faster than a NAS system. Some of its great features are hybrid Serial ATA disk based storage, compatible 1.5 & 3.0Gbp/s disks, embedded hardware RAID controller with dual GbE port, 2 GbE full iSCSI offload with load-balancing & fail-over, one logic volume shared by as many as 16 hosts, Windows MPIO support, host access control, & CHAP and easy LCD control, Remote monitoring and RAID management over TCP.

About Matthew Meyer and K5 Technologies

Matt Meyer is a VMware Architect/Consultant. Matt holds a industry certifications including VMware VCP, Microsoft MCSE and Citrix CCA. He has worked as a technology consultant in the Dallas-Ft. Worth metro area, designing in large scale ESX Server deployments for major firms such as Hewlett-Packard, Nokia, Verizon and IBM. K5 Technologies specializes in consulting with clients to help lower their IT budgets by ways of Virtualization and dedicated hosting. We offer enterprise-class hosting services to companies of all sizes. Our hosting offerings allow small to medium-sized businesses access to the same tools and infrastructure as the fortune 500 without the added cost of support, hardware, and on-site personnel.