Kualo serves tens of thousands of customers globally, and needed a reliable and highly-scalable storage solution to increase capacity and speed up performance of its ever-increasing data pool. The team had in the past deployed Nexenta installations as well as standalone FreeNAS and Open Filer servers, but these legacy systems were slow and capability limitations were a serious problem; very soon scalability and performance problems appeared or returned, and enterprise level solutions proved financially prohibitive.
StorPool replaced Kualo’s legacy systems with a single solution to solve all their ongoing storage problems: from bottlenecks and slow speeds, to the flexibility to scale up as the company grows and its storage demands increase. Since installing StorPool, Kualo has experienced no downtime; unplanned outages are consigned to the past.
Kualo has two StorPool deployments – one in UK and one in US. Even on the smaller deployment, Kualo has achieved outstanding performance from the start:
- 120,000 IOPS random read
- 45,000 IOPS random write
- 1,670 MB/s sequential read
- 530 MB/s sequential write
The above figures are measured on a cluster of just three storage servers. The performance scales linearly with any server added to the StorPool cluster.
Kualo staff manage most services by command line – the same way StorPool operates – which has resulted in a flatter and shorter learning curve. The team has also taken advantage of StorPool’s API to script and integrate StorPool software with existing tools, such as Kualo’s monitoring system, with ease.
StorPool’s software, initially deployed on six of Kualo’s Linux servers, has small CPU and RAM overheads, hence Kualo has been able to migrate its internal company servers onto data nodes, achieving even greater savings and simplicity. StorPool’s ‘pay-as-you-grow’ licensing model allows Kualo to realise significant financial savings too by not charging upfront for unnecessary capacity while still being highly scalable as the business grows. Kualo is now evaluating StorPool for other areas of its business, including shared hosting and enterprise-level managed hosting clients.
“StorPool has given us the confidence to grow our business,” said Craig Luke, Operations Director at Kualo. “We have four key criteria for our business: performance, redundancy, scalability and cost-effectiveness, and StorPool delivers superbly in all these areas while allowing us to simplify our infrastructure. Having no storage worries frees up our time and allows us to push sales and grow our business in a way that was impossible before StorPool.”
Boyan Ivanov, CEO and co-founder at StorPool, said “We are very proud of our innovative solution and of our customer service, and I’m delighted that another customer has seen such significant savings as well as performance and reliability increases. By working closely with Kualo we have designed a storage environment that meets all their requirements while freeing up human resources that can now focus on other areas of the datacentre.”
