Servosity Backup Solution With Two Aberdeen ZFS SANs

"We had some very tough challenges," says Damien Stevens, founder and CEO of Servosity. "We needed 24/7/365 operations with no maintenance windows or unplanned downtime [and] unlimited growth capabilities, and we needed the speed of SAS drives and the sophistication of an Enterprise SAN – and we needed all that for far less the cost of an enterprise SAN or even SAS drives. We needed SAS performance and reliability on a SATA budget."

Choosing The Solution
Servosity knew it wanted to take advantage of Nexenta Systems, Inc.’s NexentaStor NAS/SAN software platform, but it also knew it would need the right hardware to run it. That’s why Servosity opted for two of Aberdeen LLC’s AberSAN ZXP High Availability ZFS SAN units and one 45-bay JBOD in order to handle the NexentaStor XZFS file system with 144TB of licensing. Servosity chose Aberdeen’s AberSAN solution for its versatility as well as its ability to work well with the NexentaStor platform.

"The ZFS file system is stable, scalable, and fast," Stevens says. "On top of that, Nexenta’s NexentaStor commercial offering adds additional features as well as enterprise support, and Aberdeen is one of the few vendors that can custom-build a hardware solution designed specifically for NexentaStor. It’s the perfect marriage of hardware and software."

Aberdeen’s AberSAN ZXP product is designed to be scalable and has other customizable options. For instance, the base solution is a 2U head unit, but there are options for 3U and 4U JBOD expansions. There are also multiple power supply, OS, and storage options. It’s this customization that allowed Servosity to deploy these products and know they would perform as expected.

Implementation and Results
Stevens admits that Servosity had some unique needs from the start and that it would be difficult to match them, so he knew there would be challenges along the way. "With some of these technologies, we’ve been a very early adopter," Stevens says.

Because of this, Servosity went through a testing phase to find the right balance of hardware and software to get the performance it needed. He says Servosity wouldn’t have been able to create the perfect solution to its problem without the constant support of Aberdeen, which included the company sending evaluation units to Servosity and providing advice and expertise that aided the company in building the solution for its needs.

"With a sophisticated system spanning multiple data centers and huge amounts of storage, there’s much more to it than buying a product," Stevens says. "The difference for us has been Aberdeen and Nexenta working together with our engineers to custom-build and then custom-tune a system that meets our needs and has exceeded our expectations."

Once the entire system was installed, Servosity started seeing the benefits. Stevens says that traditional systems such as the one the company installed are often at risk for ‘silent data corruption,’ which happens naturally over time with a constant flow of data. To prevent this, ZFS systems self-heal when a disk presents corrupt data, which protects against hardware failure and prevents the hardware from corrupting the data, according to Stevens. In addition to preventing data corruption, Servosity is pleased that the system can use SSDs to cache for SATA and SAS drives to make the system faster.

Using Aberdeen’s Products Now And In The Future
Overall, Servosity is happy with its decision to invest in Aberdeen’s AberSAN solution and plans on using Aberdeen’s products in the future. In fact, Stevens says that Servosity’s projections "show a need for 400% of our current infrastructure in the next 12 months." To help meet the demand, Servosity will continue to use Aberdeen for its customizable and scalable Nexenta products in order to help the company continue to grow.

The AberSAN is a customizable and versatile storage solution that incorporates Intel Xeon 5600/5500 Series processors and is designed to be both scalable and safe. Aberdeen offers configuration options and will work with companies to fine-tune the solution to meet their specific needs. The AberSAN uses a ZFS file system to avoid traditional data corruption issues and prevent stored information from being irreparably damaged or lost.