Toronto Internet Exchange Selected StorMagic SvSAN

In 1998, Toronto Internet Exchange (TorIX), the first non-profit Internet exchange Internet exchange in Toronto, Canada, was created to connect the Internet traffic of Canadian businesses by using local network infrastructure.

A group of experts collaborated to establish TorIX with the intention of overcoming the cost and latency issues of having Canadian traffic flow through the US.

TorIX has over 250 organizations connected with access to direct routes from many diverse peering partners.

As a non-profit organization, TorIX focuses on investing funds into infrastructure, so that its technology can stay up to date to remain at the forefront of the Internet Exchange Point (IXP) industry. Previously, it was using a VMware installation with no replication, however it wanted to avoid large, hardware-dependent installations associated with vSAN and to find a solution better fitted for its long-term needs.

TorIX began the process of evaluating market options for an infrastructure solution to power its IT operations that was simple and easy to manage. More specifically, it was searching for a solution that it could trust with managing all of its critical external services for customers, including its online portal systems, telemetry data, web and mail applications.

Solution
To power its non-profit Internet exchange, TorIX needed a hyperconverged solution between its two datacenters with performance and availability. After evaluating multiple options, TorIX found that StorMagic SvSAN suited its needs because it was simple for its IT team to manage and easy to upgrade, while still remaining cost effective and modern. Furthermore, SvSAN’s stretch/metro cluster capability enabled TorIX to site its 2 SvSAN nodes 3 kilometers apart with no impact on performance thanks to SvSAN’s low bandwidth requirements.

TorIX has a 2-node cluster consisting of Cisco servers and vSphere as the hypervisor. With SvSAN, it can manage its IT infrastructure with 100% redundancy and HA. SvSAN powers all of its critical external services for customers, such as web and mail applications, online portal systems and telemetry data. It has reported maximum uptime in operations, delivering powerful direct Internet routes to peering partners without interruptions.

In addition, throughout the pre and post-implementation process, TorIX found StorMagic’s 24/7 customer support responsive and helpful with technical expertise.

Why StorMagic: 

• Easy To Manage: At the top of TorIX’s priority list was a hyperconverged solution that was easy for its IT team to manage, which is why the company turned to SvSAN. TorIX found that SvSAN is reliable and simple to manage for its day-to-day operations.
• Uptime: High data availability is critical to TorIX and their customers. SvSAN delivers maximum uptime, so that the non-profit has peace of mind that its systems will not fail.
• 100% redundancy: TorIX trusts StorMagic’s HA for critical applications that would pose severe consequences to customers if taken offline. With SvSAN, it has 100% redundancy and downtime has been virtually eliminated.
• Performance: SvSAN creates highly available shared storage across 2 nodes. TorIX has improved performance rates since after making the switch to StorMagic.

“TorIX is driven to directly connect Canadian business’ Internet traffic through the local network infrastructure, while maintaining strong network performance and low latency. To deliver this to customers, we prioritize investing in modern technology for our IT infrastructure, so that we can remain at the forefront of the industry. This is why we selected StorMagic SvSAN, so that TorIX can now power operations with a modern system that is easy to manage, flexible and high-performing. We have been 100% satisfied with StorMagic, which we trust to power all of our critical external services for our customers and have the peace of mind that our systems will never fail,” said Jon Nistor board director, TorIX.

Server Configuration (Per Server)