Before partnering with HyperGrid, Tearfund employed a traditional three-tier IT infrastructure consisting of three high-end C7000 HP Bladecentre chassis, each with eight blades and close to 70TB of Lefthand SAN (SAS) storage with associated networking technologies for switching, provided by Cisco and Brocade. Despite being spread over seven 42U racks between two data centres, performance bottlenecks were however common. Performance issues were common due largely to a particular decision to support OLAP cubes.
Stuart Hall, Infrastructure Lead at Tearfund, said: “We faced a lot of performance issues owing to the physical separation of logical storage from the memory and compute which led to up to 12 hours of processing time, 2 hours on a good day. As such we decided to carry out proofs of concept on HyperGrid and its leading competitor, both of whom could support our preferred hypervisor – Hyper-V. As part of the PoC, Tearfund challenged both to reduce the processing time to below one hour. HyperGrid succeeded in reducing the time to just 20 minutes.
“Due to HyperGrid’s impressive proof of concept, we have since purchased two three-node all-SSD HyperCloud platforms, occupying 6U of rack space including the associated switching. This has seen us jump from IOP capacity measured in the thousands to a system where we measure the capacity in millions. One chassis would have been enough, but we purchased a second to give us full failover capacity for BCP at our remote data centre.”
Since the implementation, Tearfund has seen significant improvements in performance, as well as impressive cost savings. These include a reduction in racks from seven to just one, a reduction in electricity usage from 22KW/h to 3KW/h for all back-office IT equipment which in real time payments over five years will save Tearfund over ?200,500. The ease of use for installation and management has also helped save Tearfund ?150,000 a year in engineer costs. The reliability and simplicity of HyperGrid’s solution ensures that the team does not have to learn how to use new tools and management interfaces with no need to make changes to its day-to-day DevOps management processes.
Doug Rich, Vice President of EMEA at HyperGrid, said: “We are really pleased to have worked with Tearfund to boost its processing power while helping it make substantial savings. As a global charity having to meet a diverse range of challenges, it was impossible for Tearfund to work effectively with its outdated IT infrastructure in place, and a rapid change was a necessity if the bottlenecks were to be eliminated. Our HyperCloud solution not only meets Tearfund’s immediate requirements, but we have future proofed their IT estate for the foreseeable future enabling them to focus on what matters most: relieving those in need.”
Hall concluded: “The agility that HyperGrid’s solution has delivered has been key in making a difference in the areas where we support humanitarian aid, and we are now able to do so better than we ever could, with a reduced impact on the environment and our overheads. We are delighted that HyperGrid has been part of this journey, and are thrilled with the outcome.”
