IOPSTOR

Three hundred people sign in at nine, and nothing slows down

Three hundred people signing in within minutes of each other brought a spinning-disk file server to its knees. Software-defined storage on enterprise SSD absorbed the peak, and has done for three years.

ServicesStorage

  • 300+ Signing in within minutes of each other
  • 1500+ Sign ins Every week, at full speed
  • 3 Years+ Since the last slow morning

Challenge

Every morning more than three hundred people signed in within a few minutes of each other, and the profiles and home folders they were all reaching for sat on one file server built from spinning disks. Those disks could not serve that many reads and writes at once. Signing in took minutes, and the first hour of the working day went on waiting.

Solution

IOPStor recommended enterprise SSD. It cost more than the budget allowed, so consumer NVMe drives went in instead, and they reached end of life within three months, worn out by the volume a three-hundred-user morning puts through them. What went in after that was not simply better drives: IOPStor software-defined storage on enterprise SSD, sized for the peak rather than the daily average.

Results

Three years on, nobody notices nine o'clock. Three hundred people sign in together and the storage is not the thing they wait for. The peak no longer comes close to what the array can serve, so the same system takes on new staff without another conversation about drives.

THE ARCHITECTURE

What we deployed

Not a faster drive. A different architecture, sized for the morning peak rather than the daily average.

  • IOPStor software-defined storage
  • Enterprise SSD, sized for the peak not the average
  • Profiles and home folders served from one pool
  • Headroom for staff who have not been hired yet

Is your storage the thing everyone waits for?

Tell us what you are running and we will size a solution.

Contact us

Latest

01ServicesStorage

Three hundred people sign in at nine, and nothing slows down

Three hundred people signing in within minutes of each other brought a spinning-disk file server to its knees. Software-defined storage on enterprise SSD absorbed the peak, and has done for three years.

02LogisticsVirtualization

Nine days a year down, then seven years without one

03FinanceVirtualizationHyper Convered Media

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