case study

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IBM System X the platform of choice for VMware Virtual Infrastructure 3 - Mistral

History

Established in 1994, Mistral Internet is the premier Internet Service Provider (ISP) for businesses in the UK. Mistral provides a range of products and services that focus on converging business's Internet touch-points. Mistral Internet part of Kingston Communications is a service-based communications company with its own resilient gigabit network designed from the ground up to carry “business grade” Internet traffic.

Most recently, Mistral was listed for the fourth year in the Times Sunday Times Tech Track 100 2006, as one of the top 100 fastest growing technology companies. Mistral provides a wide range of turnkey solutions for SME, corporate and government clients. Mistral's impressive client list includes Bacardi, Blockbuster, Universal Records, Microsoft, The Guardian, Royal Yachting Association, Department of Trade & Industry and Eastbourne Council.

Background

Based at Telehouse Europe (London), Global Switch (Docklands) and DediPower (Reading), Mistral's network centre is currently operating within its core capacity, minimising congestion and assuring high quality, high speed and resilient network performance. Mistral has a policy of upgrading network components when they reach 70% utilisation. Apart from being a successful ISP, Mistral offers a range of co-location and hosting services. Applying the same business policies to hosting as network provision, continually deploying new servers to increase capacity is no longer viable with the increasing costs of data-centre floor space and power. To reduce server sprawl, Mistral offer virtualised hosting services using VMware to provide virtual machine instances for customer's hosted environments. As virtualised hosting is becoming the default for hosted services, Mistral were keen to improve the consolidation ratio of virtual to physical hosts, thereby further reducing the growth in physical servers in the data-centre.

Solution

As a long-term HP Proliant user, Mistral had little understanding of the other major vendors x86 platform offerings and wanted to understand what other options were available before commencing a large scale virtualisation project. Mistral approached IBM who recommended Shift F7 as an IBM Business Partner with experience and expertise in the System x product range. As an IBM Business partner, HP Preferred Partner and VMware Enterprise partner Shift F7 had the expertise to give an independent view on both major vendors and their approach and strengths in the virtualisation market. From discussions with Mistral it was apparent they preferred a scale up approach 'lots of virtual machines on fewer larger servers', rather than scale out 'fewer virtual machines on smaller servers i.e. blades', to achieve their business objectives. Shift F7 recommended the x3850 server and VMware Virtual Infrastructure 3 as the best platform to achieve the consolidation ratios of high performance virtual machines, redundancy and resilience they required. This recommendation was followed up with a technology session run in conjunction with IBM to provide 'hands on' with the platform and to introduce complimentary technologies, IBM Director that would provide additional benefits to a system x environment and VMware licensing and support from IBM.

IBM System x 3850

The IBM System x3850 delivers outstanding performance, extremely low latency and high availability and manageability along with advanced, integrated technologies that help protect business's IT investment. The x3850 is designed with IBM X3 Architecture, the third generation of mainframe-inspired IBM Enterprise X-Architecture Technology, and 64-bit Intel Xeon Processors MP.

The x3850 provides more computing power in a smaller form factor (3U) than many competitive models, giving organisations powerful commercial application-hosting capabilities in a compact design. It delivers up to 16 times the memory addressing and up to three times the CPU bus bandwidth compared to previous server designs. Using the IBM XA-64e- chipset, the x3850 sets a new standard for industry-leading 4-processor x 86 performances by intelligently managing frequently accessed data. With its mainframe-inspired snoop filter integrated in the processor/memory controller, the x3850 tracks data stored across the dual front-side bus inside the on-chip Intel processor caches. An IBM developed 48Mb embedded DRAM serves as a cache directory and improves overall performance by minimising bus congestion and reducing latency compared to competing x86 designs. The XA-64e speeds communications between the processors, main memory and I/O, helping the x3850 power commercial IT applications.

VMware Virtual Infrastructure 3

VMware® Infrastructure is the most widely deployed software suite for optimising and managing industry standard IT environments through virtualisation - from the desktop to the data centre. The only production-ready virtualisation software suite, VMware Infrastructure is proven to deliver results at more than 20,000 customers of all sizes, used in a wide variety of environments and applications. The suite is fully optimised, rigorously tested and certified for the widest range of hardware, operating systems and software applications. VMware Infrastructure provides built-in management, resource optimisation, application availability and operational automation capabilities that deliver transformative cost savings as well as increased operational efficiency, flexibility and IT service levels.

Implementation

Mistral implemented a VMware Virtual Infrastructure cluster, currently consisting of six IBM x3850 servers, with each server connected to resilient centralised storage using iSCSI and NFS. The cluster utilises VMware High Availability (HA) and Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) giving extremely high resilience and dynamic performance management.

The cluster is run with N+1 capacity. This provides sufficient capacity to cope with failure of a host server with minimal downtime to the virtual servers running on the failed host. It also means that when maintenance work is necessary on one of the servers, the cluster has sufficient capacity to continue to run the virtual servers without any disruption to customers as the virtual servers are transparently migrated to a different host using VMware VMotion technology.

Mistral are currently able to host 25-30 typical virtual servers on each x3850, giving considerable savings in hardware costs but more importantly greatly reducing rack space power and cooling requirements. With the planned addition of more memory to the hosts, it will be possible to further increase this consolidation ratio bringing even greater savings.

www.mistral.net