Success Story
PeakColo Guarantees 100% SLA for the Cloud
on NetApp with Data ONTAP 8 Clustering
KEY HIGHLIGHTS
Industry
Cloud services
The Challenge
Penetrate the highly competitive cloud services market while enabling service provider
partners to meet diverse end-customer requirements.
The Solution
Deliver PeakColo WhiteCloud Services® on NetApp® FAS3270 and FAS3240 storage systems managed with Data ONTAP® 8 Clustering.
Benefits
• Partners provision storage in less than two hours
• Scales to manage 300% annual growth and positions for new market opportunities
• Meets rigorous 100%-availability SLAs
• Decreases capex and opex via 73% storage requirement reduction
Customer Profile
Founded in 2006, PeakColo is a cloud services provider headquartered in Denver, Colorado. The privately owned company focuses on infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud computing, delivering public, private, hybrid, disaster recovery, and custom solutions. PeakColo delivers its full-scale enterprise-class cloud solutions out of five data centers in Denver, Colorado; Phoenix, Arizona; London, England; and Seattle, Washington.
The Challenge
Delivering competitive cloud services
Whether delivering a secure, single-tenant hosted private cloud or a multi-tenant public cloud, PeakColo empowers enterprises to reduce capital expenditures with a resilient, pay-as-you-go operating-expense approach to IT. With a focus on IaaS solutions with on-demand computing and storage resources, PeakColo helps enable customers to concentrate on their core business rather than on their data center.
To further its competitive edge, the company recently launched its PeakColo WhiteCloud Services, a unique IaaS solution that allows value-added resellers, systems integrators, and managed service providers to rebrand the solution for their own cloud services. “Our PeakColo WhiteCloud Services and technology solutions enable our customers to enter the cloud service-provider market and diversify their offerings without making huge up-front capital investments,” says Luke Norris, chief executive officer at PeakColo.
To deliver its competitive WhiteCloud Services, PeakColo needed to enhance its data centers with a flexible, cost-effective storage solution and robust storage management capabilities. The company needed highly flexible, scalable storage clusters that would allow it to quickly provision storage for new service provider customers. Secure multi-tenancy was imperative to quickly and effectively partition storage into private, flexible storage environments. PeakColo leveraged important strategic technology partnerships with VMware, Brocade, and Dell to build a state-of-the-art cloud infrastructure to support its WhiteCloud Services. It ultimately selected NetApp to serve as the storage foundation for the enterprise-class IaaS solution.
The Solution
High performance and secure multi-tenancy
PeakColo, a participant in the NetApp Partner Program and a NetApp Gold Level Service Provider, deployed a combined 10 NetApp FAS3270 and FAS3240 storage systems in its 5 Type-II SSAE 16/SOC 1 data centers. NetApp Data ONTAP 8 operating in Cluster-Mode provides the massive throughput and scalability needed to rapidly grow its WhiteCloud Services while delivering superior cloud services to existing customers. NetApp Vserver helps PeakColo achieve maximum flexibility of its shared storage infrastructure with secure multi-tenancy.
“PeakColo is in the business of enabling our service provider customers to be successful by helping them achieve new levels of cost efficiency and service flexibility,” says Norris. “NetApp is a business enabler for PeakColo. NetApp Data ONTAP 8 Cluster-Mode helps us optimize our NetApp storage environment, securely host multiple customers on individual storage systems, and easily scale to manage 300% annual growth.”
Data ONTAP 8 operating in Cluster-Mode is configured in pairs for high availability, which helps PeakColo meet its stringent 100% uptime SLAs. The Data ONTAP operating system equips PeakColo with the flexibility to add up to dozens of FAS controllers and storage as needed to scale to multiple gigabytes per second of throughput and petabytes of capacity. The company balances performance and cost with NetApp multiprotocol support, which enables PeakColo to leverage both NFS and iSCSI investments. NetApp deduplication enables PeakColo to reduce storage requirements by up to 73%, decreasing hardware, power, and cooling costs.
NetApp Flash Cache provides PeakColo with the NetApp Virtual Storage Tier, offering the company additional FAS3270 and FAS3240 performance benefits by combining NetApp efficiency and intelligent caching technologies to optimize storage system performance. The NetApp Virtual Storage Tier promotes PeakColo customers’ hot data in real time without moving the data, allowing the company to scale performance and capacity in a highly efficient manner.
NetApp storage supports PeakColo’s virtualized VMware® vSphere® and vCloud® Director environment. PeakColo is a Premier VMware Service Provider Partner and one of the first cloud infrastructure companies to achieve the VMware vCloud Powered® designation. PeakColo builds a unique branded vCloud Director instance per white label, allowing customers to have a dedicated white label environment that is branded, co-managed, and highly flexible. NetApp Vserver integrated with vCloud Director helps PeakColo achieve maximum flexibility of its shared storage infrastructure with secure multi-tenancy.
The tightly integrated NetApp and VMware environment enables PeakColo and its customers to build multi-tenant private clouds by pooling infrastructure resources into virtual data centers and providing access to users through Web-based portals. In addition, VMware vCloud Director enables multi-tenant hybrid clouds that combine on-premise private clouds with the PeakColo off-premise cloud.
Business Benefits
A “game changer” for cloud services
Backed by NetApp storage, PeakColo WhiteCloud Services deliver on-demand, pay-as-you-go computing and storage resources to the company’s distribution, data center, service provider, systems integrator, and VAR channel partners. The unique WhiteCloud Services enable PeakColo customers in turn to use the VMware vCloud Powered badging. PeakColo’s WhiteCloud Services, enhanced with NetApp flexibility and scalability, enable PeakColo customers to deliver value-added services to their customers within the framework of the PeakColo cloud.
“PeakColo is a trailblazer in enabling our service provider customers to deliver both public cloud services and value-added services such as data migration and data assessment from the same flexible cloud framework,” notes Norris. “NetApp Data ONTAP 8 Clustering is key to providing our customers the flexibility to leverage the same storage environment to meet the diverse and changing needs of their customers. Simply put, NetApp Data ONTAP 8 Clustering is a game changer.”
NetApp helps PeakColo meet the changing service requirements of its customers with NetApp Data ONTAP 8 Cluster-Mode, allowing PeakColo to deliver mixed workloads in a balanced, non-disruptive way. Whether customers demand high random reads, high random writes, non-random reads, or other types of workloads, IT managers can easily move data between controllers and storage tiers without disrupting users and applications. They can also seamlessly perform maintenance and upgrade activities by moving data among controllers, with no disruption to systems and business operations. In addition, PeakColo can also easily scale the storage as a logical clustered unit.
“The flexibility of NetApp Data ONTAP 8 Clustering is invaluable to us as a service provider, allowing us to be much more nimble than our service provider competitors,” notes Norris. “I don’t know any storage operating system technology that comes remotely close to it.”
Easy storage provisioning, advanced storage management
PeakColo delivers value in every customer solution by staying true to its company mantra of “total flexibility,” with a commitment to address each service provider customer’s unique challenges through flexible cloud solutions. Data ONTAP 8 Clustering technology helps enable PeakColo to build individual virtual SANs for its customers and connect the SANs to each customer’s private VMware cloud environment. Quickly provisioning virtual SANs is vital to customer satisfaction and revenue generation.
“NetApp Data ONTAP 8 Cluster-Mode enables us to provision storage in less than two hours and establish the entire virtual SAN for a new customer in less than four hours,” says Norris. “From there, customers can provision the resources needed to meet the requirements of their own customers. Our customers log into the Data ONTAP 8 Web interface and view and manage the storage like their own private SAN. We can manage the entire NetApp cluster from a central portal. Less than two full-time storage administrators manage 2PB of NetApp data. NetApp helps us reduce IT management costs, and we can pass along those savings to our customers.”
Penetrating the cloud market
Besides streamlining storage management, Data ONTAP 8 Clustering allows PeakColo to scale out at the pace needed to be competitive in the cloud market. NetApp performance enabled by the Virtual Storage Tier, 10GB interfaces, and other capabilities helps PeakColo achieve 100% availability and meet rigorous SLAs with its customers. NetApp also helps the company close deals when service providers experience the superior I/O throughput delivered by NetApp during proof-of-concept (POC) trials.
“Service providers realize that through our WhiteCloud Services on NetApp storage, we can deliver a level of scalability and performance that, in reality, they simply couldn’t afford if they invested in their own infrastructures,” emphasizes Norris. “We can deliver hyperscale cloud services to a $50 million company and reduce their day-to-day processing from days to hours or from hours to minutes, providing them significant cost savings. We love doing POCs because we’ve never lost a prospect that gets a taste of a virtual NetApp SAN. As soon as IT executives run applications on the WhiteCloud Services network infrastructure, they’re absolutely blown away by the speed that NetApp delivers.”
SOLUTION COMPONENTS
NetApp Products
NetApp FAS3270 and FAS3240 storage systems
Data ONTAP 8.1 operating in Cluster-Mode
Virtual Storage Tier
Flash Cache
Deduplication
Protocols
NFS
iSCSI
Third-Party Products
VMware vSphere
VMware vCloud Director
“The flexibility of NetApp Data ONTAP 8 Cluster-Mode is invaluable to us as a service provider, allowing us to be much more nimble than our service provider competitors. I don’t know any storage operating system technology that comes remotely close to it.”
Luke Norris
Chief Executive Officer, PeakColo
“We love doing POCs because we’ve never lost a prospect that gets a taste of a virtual NetApp clustered SAN. As soon as IT executives run applications on the WhiteCloud Services network infrastructure, they’re absolutely blown away by the speed that NetApp delivers.”
Luke Norris
Chief Executive Officer, PeakColo
NetApp creates innovative storage and data management solutions that deliver outstanding cost efficiency and accelerate business breakthroughs. Discover our passion for helping companies around the world go further, faster at www.netapp.com.
Go further, faster®
© 2012 NetApp, Inc. All rights reserved. No portions of this document may be reproduced without prior written consent of NetApp, Inc. Specifications are subject to change without notice. NetApp, the NetApp logo, Go further, faster and Data ONTAP are trademarks or registered trademarks of NetApp, Inc. in the United States and/or other countries. VMware, vSphere, and vCloud are registered trademarks of VMware, Inc. All other brands or products are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders and should be treated as such. CSS-6563-0612
About PeakColo – PeakColo provides fully redundant, enterprise-class white-label WhiteCloud Services® to its Distribution, Data Center, Service Provider, System Integrator and VAR channel partners. PeakColo is a Premier level VMware Service Provider Partner and one of the first to deliver VMware’s vCloud Director enabled solutions. Further, PeakColo is a NetApp Gold Level Service Provider. It has three data centers in the Denver, Colorado area, one data center in Phoenix, Arizona, one data center in Seattle, WA, one in the U.K. For more information, visit the PeakColo website at http://www.peakcolo.com.
WhiteCloud Services®, BlueCloud Services®, RedCloud Services® and Think Outside the Rack® are registered Trademarks of PeakColo.
VMware and VMware vCloud Powered are registered trademarks and/or trademarks of VMware, Inc. in the United States and/or other jurisdictions. The use of the word “partner” or “partnership” does not imply a legal partnership relationship between VMware and any other company.
