vHost in Vietnam Deploys StorPool Storage

In order to keep their position, vHost, a service provider in Vietnam adopts, the latest technologies to deliver better services and products on the market.

vHost has more than 10 years of industry experience at major industries in the region, committed to bring the best quality, fastest services and professional support possible at a reasonable cost.

“We would definitely recommend StorPool to other companies that are looking for primary block storage. StorPool is a great product, with exceptional performance and professional support, at affordable prices. Our research showed that currently commercial solutions are better than open source,” said Nghia Than, CEO and founder, vHost.vn

Challenges and pain points

• Reliability issues: Experienced incidents leading to downtime, coupled with poor support from the vendor
• Lack of IO/s: Customers complained of performance issues
• Considerable churn: Losing customers every week
• Too much time lost in managing storage
  

vHost knew they needed to change their storage. SANs are uneconomical, thus they were looking for a software storage solution. vHost tested different software products, from open source to commercial products. They tried Ceph (Rados Block Device, RBD), ZFS, Virtuozzo Storage, OnApp Integrated Storage, VSAN (VMware) but none of them met their business needs.

For example with one of the solutions their VPS service has been always registering errors and they had to fix it manually like a routine task. The support from the vendor never resolved their problems. This peaked when vHost experienced severe storage outage, lasting close to 48 hours and many customers left. vHost needed to change things.

Why StorPool
When vHost tested StorPool it proved to be stable. It also outperformed all other products they tested. On the same test hardware, StorPool achieved the highest levels of IO/s. The test set-up consisted of 3 servers: E5-2670v2, RAM: 4 x 8GB DDR3 1600Mhz, SSD: 3 x 960GB Samsung PM863, HDD: 4x2TB HGST UltraStar, NIC: Intel X520-DA2, 2 switch: IBM Rackswitch G8124E. 

The results showed increase IO/s as follows:

Results in latency and Sequential R/W were:

Using solution that increase IO/s and can deliver hundreds of thousands of IO/s allowed vHost to amaze customers with boost of I/Os at the same prices. This lead to an increase in customer satisfaction.

“The system proved to be really stable. Not only because it is a distributed system, but more so because of its architecture and very good implementation. We never faced any downtime issues which made our customers happy and loyal. StorPool’s team helped us not only in deploying StorPool, but also tuned the system to be really efficient. They provide outstanding 24/7 support and proactive monitoring,” shares Nghia.

Benefits of using StorPool

• Added vital shared storage to their VPS service. Before, when a node failed, vHost’s customers were experiencing downtime. vHost simply powers-up the customer’s VPS on another host, as the data is available on the StorPool shared storage system.
• With StorPool vHost unlocked the highest possible performance from their hardware, with low initial investment. They can host approximately 2 times more VPS customers on the same physical hardware.
• Better service quality – vHost receive 24/7 support.
• StorPool helped vHost solve all issues related to their Cloud VPS services. These included helping vHost re-design their infrastructure stack and tuning network and hosts, besides storage.
  

“We chose StorPool because the product is simply brilliant and the team has deep understanding of the technology. We have never had a partner like StorPool before. The team helped us tune the servers to get more performance even though it was not of their responsibility. We are also very happy with their 24/7 support services,” said Nghia.

Case study