White Papers

verification problems in the first build, we turned to Dell EMC vSAN
Ready Nodes, which were released after the G1 build.”
The G2 HCI used six Dell EMC PowerEdge R740xd servers and
featured an all-flash SSD configuration. The all-flash configuration
enabled vSAN RAID 6 Erasure Coding, which secured redundancy
while also ensuring sufficient storage capacity (100TB). “G2
exhibited a high level of performance in every benchmark. Although
performance would also have improved if we had used RAID 1 on
G2, Erasure Coding provided redundancy with a greater usable disk
capacity. We are also considering utilizing different configurations
on a per-case basis, such as using RAID 1 for services where
performance is crucial,” explains Hideyuki Ezaki of the iTSherpa
Infrastructure Service Department.
Rapid provisioning of VMs
improves service quality and
proposal capabilities
While iTSherpa is currently using both G1 and G2 HCIs to provide
services, it is gradually transitioning to the G2 and will rebuild the
G1 in the future to improve its performance. The company has
also added a Dell EMC PowerEdge R440 equipped with VMware
vCenter® to act as a monitoring server for the G1 and G2, and
a R740xd and Dell EMC PowerEdge R530 to the G2 as test and
validation servers. According to Tomislav Knezevic of the iTSherpa
Infrastructure Service Department, “VMware vCenter is extremely
convenient as we can centrally manage the G1 and G2 environments
as well as the added validation servers.”
iTSherpa has been operating the vSAN-based HCI for over a year
and is running more than 300 VM on the system. The number of VM
increases daily to match demand from the development side. “As
there are dozens of prepared templates, we are able to provision a
VM in around 30 minutes to an hour once we receive a request; this
is very convenient. It takes a little bit of time if we are adding multiple
middleware, but it rarely takes an entire day. With physical servers,
the process would take at least one month–possibly several. We now
spend this time on development, and we are able to expand services
rapidly. It also gives us time for trial and error,” says Daichi Hiratsuka
of the iTSherpa Infrastructure Service Department.
With the G1 and G2 HCI, iTSherpa has overcome the issues of
scalability and speed associated with physical servers, solved the
problem of cloud costs and quality, and can now offer services at
the quality and price that users demand. “HCI allows us to trial
customer requests immediately and make swift proposals that
become services; we can also make proposals to customers that
have a high volume of traffic and require a large disk capacity. Our
proposal speed is 20-30 percent higher than what is used to be,”
adds Tsutomu Aizono, Executive Director of iTSherpa.
“Our HCI built with Dell EMC
PowerEdge servers exhibited a
high level of performance in all
benchmarks. Erasure Coding on
an all-flash configuration provides
redundancy while also ensuring
sufficient storage capacity.”
Hideyuki Ezaki
Infrastructure Service Department
iTSherpa Co., Ltd.
“vCenter is extremely convenient
as we can centrally manage the
G1 and G2 environments as well
as the added validation servers.”
Tomislav Knezevic
Infrastructure Service Department
iTSherpa Co., Ltd.