Global publishing firm exceeds SLAs with scale-out flash storage

Agora Publishing has 24 affiliates and subsidiaries located in eight different countries. As a global publishing house, Agora is faced with management and cost-of-ownership challenges associated with its growing volume of electronic data. To address these mounting challenges, the company moved away from its previous legacy scale-up storage infrastructure to a 10-Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) storage solution that uses Coraid EtherFlash, a modular, scale-out, all-flash storage appliance based on solid-state drives.

“We needed a better way to manage our data,” said Jason Pell, CIO for Agora Publishing. “Coraid provided us with a solution that better positions my team to meet the company’s evolving storage needs. The combination of Coraid scale-out flash storage and Ethernet helped us deliver on a number of operational goals such as improved performance, scalability and reliability.”

Coraid EtherFlash is a storage solution bundle that combines high-performance flash drives with the massively parallel scale-out architecture of Coraid EtherDrive® to provide superior performance for I/O-intensive applications. Coraid EtherDrive block storage solutions offer flexible building blocks for cloud-scale storage deployments. EtherDrive leverages a connectionless Layer-2 storage networking fabric and software intelligence to aggregate commodity hardware resources and manage them as a pooled resource.

EtherDrive offers customers the flexibility to deploy any mix of SSD, SAS and SATA drives in a single array, based on their evolving requirements, and to add appliances to expand capacity and performance. For example, a high-end Web application could leverage 24 or 36 SSDs in a single array, while a VDI environment might combine 6 SSDs for shared boot images with 30 SATA drives for high-capacity file storage. EtherDrive also provides the ability to accelerate I/O performance with highly customisable flash-based caching.

Applications like databases, email and analytics require a very high number of IOPS; meeting these requirements with spinning media such as SAS or SATA disk drives is often prohibitively expensive. A typical 15K SAS drive provides approximately 200 IOPS, while a flash drive (SSD) is orders of magnitude faster. Flash storage delivers outstanding performance, greater reliability and significant power savings while providing the industry’s highest IOPS per dollar.