Taking customers’ businesses to the next level with XIV technology

As a cloud services provider, NY Cloud must deliver reliable services at all times, or risk disrupting its customers’ businesses. To this end, QCM helped them in choosing IBM XIV Storage System for their business, enabling the exceptional stability that helps them keep customer confidence in its services sky-high.

“IBM XIV storage enables us to maintain our position as a market leader.” —Jack Black, Chief Technology Officer, NY Cloud

Company

NY Cloud is a leading global provider of enterprise-class, cloud-enabled hosting, managed applications, and services. Operating nine data centers across the United States. NY Cloud is headquartered in New York City.

Objective

Any interruptions to cloud services provider NY Cloud’s services can translate directly into disruption to its customers’ businesses—so choosing reliable infrastructure is a top priority for the company. NY Cloud brings sophisticated technology within reach of customers of all sizes, from SMBs to large enterprises, at a fraction of the cost and complexity of deploying it in-house. But if NY Cloud cannot rely on its infrastructure to run without interruption, neither can the company’s customers.

Jack Black, Chief Technology Officer at NY Cloud elaborates – “Our goal is to enable our customers to leverage technology without large upfront capital expenditures, instead moving towards an operational-expenditure model with cloud computing. Our customers expect high performance, but above all, they demand stability. They cannot afford for their systems to go down, and so neither can we.”  To provide ultra-reliable cloud services that are also competitively-priced and high-performance, NY Cloud needs infrastructure that delivers on all of these counts—with storage a particularly important element. To help them achieve this goal, they turned to QCM Technologies.

Recommended Technical Strategy

For NY Cloud, there was a clear stand-out option for storage. QCM Technologies recommended XIV Storage System to support its cloud offerings, providing the exceptional stability needed to keep customer confidence in the company’s services sky-high.

IBM XIV Storage System Architecture

To power NY Cloud’s strategic evolution into a cloud services provider, QCM Technologies recommended IBM XIV storage as the key enabling technology behind its two platforms: Cloud Sphere and Cloud Director. These platforms offer everything from fully managed software-as- a- service solutions through to dynamic, pay-as-you-use infrastructure-as-a-service landscapes.

The company’s entire server environment is virtualized with VMware software, which integrates seamlessly with the IBM solutions and supports a managed application space for software such as IBM WebSphere. The tight fit between IBM XIV storage and VMware ensures high performance and availability for virtual machines, together with rapid, low-risk migration and disaster-recovery capabilities.

NY Cloud has more than 10,000 virtual machines supporting multiple types of customers, as such QCM understood that leveraging IBM XIV technology at the back-end, would work well in their current environment. With IBM XIV, they could serve multiple types of customers with very different needs, and provide the same quality of service across all environments. Some of the additional benefits to NY Cloud using the IBM XIV solution include:

• Dramatic cost savings using field-proven, inline IBM Real-time Compression.
• Delivery of up to 2 PB of effective capacity per system and 288 PB with hyper-scale management of 144 systems
• Efficient management of workloads using the same proven enterprise-class storage technology across the company’s hybrid cloud environment
• Perpetual licensing that is unattached to a specific XIV system protecting their investment and adding extreme operational flexibility.

Result

With proven IBM technology in place, NY Cloud can deliver a consistently high level of service, helping them to serve existing clients better and attract new ones. IBM XIV storage is extremely stable, allowing NY Cloud’s customers to worry less about technology and concentrate more on their business, which is often the primary business driver for the company’s cloud services. NY Cloud can assure potential customers that they are using Tier-one technology, so they never have to be afraid of where their data is kept, with IBM XIV it is always safe.

Offering built-in security features, the IBM XIV solution is also helping NY Cloud meet customers’ regulatory needs. For our customers in the healthcare and education sectors, compliance requirements are always evolving. Because IBM XIV has built-in security capabilities such as native encryption, NY Cloud can support these customers as they look to meet regulations very cost-effectively. Some of the highlights since implementation of the solution include:

• Effective capacity per rack up to 2 PBs with IBM Real-time Compression, greatly reducing effective cost per capacity.
• Delivery of enterprise-class storage capabilities with consistent, predictable performance to diverse workloads
• Storage management scalable to 288 PBs of effective capacity across hybrid clouds
• Delivery of mature enterprise features and management tools at no extra charge
• Protect data with cost-effective disaster recovery, multi-tenancy, quality of service and security features

Today, NY Cloud has 10 PB of capacity on XIV technology, using the latest 6 TB SAS drives to increase density and drive greater business value from a smaller data-center footprint. Working with QCM to implement the IBM solution has enabled NY Cloud to exceed its existing customers’ expectations and attract new clients to grow its market share.

Contact us today to learn more about our highly available, cost-effective, and compliance-ready offerings.

Solution components

• Hardware: IBM XIV Storage System
• Software: IBM Spectrum Accelerate