ImageTrend Scales Cloud Services With Microsoft Hyper-V and DataON

Customer Background
ImageTrend, Inc. is a data management software and solutions company that primarily supports first responder agencies. Needless to say, they require the highest SLAs for systems availability, enterprise-level data management and storage resources. Based in Lakeville, Minnesota, ImageTrend provides hosting services and supports over 1000 virtual machines running hundreds of proprietary and off-the-shelf applications for their customers in over thirty states.
The Classic “Do More with Less” IT Challenge
ImageTrend faced a classic IT challenge…how to cost effectively scale operations while managing costs. They are supporting multiple sites running over 1000 VMs, with a wide variety of customer developed and off-the-shelf applications, including over 250 SQL instances. They began with a new strategic plan to overcome the challenge of doing more with less. This included:

• Accelerating their migration to an all Microsoft and Hyper-V cloud infrastructure
• Leverage Microsoft Storage Spaces and SoFS to move away from their Compellent SAN
• Ability to leverage cloud bursting and DR with Microsoft Azure
• Unify management with MSSC and VMM
• Simplify VM migration between on premise and Microsoft Azure Cloud
• Leverage SoFS & JBOD architectures to lower OPEX, CAPEX and power

To start the implementation of this strategy they chose Microsoft Hyper-V as their standard virtualized environment, began replacing their aging Fibre Channel-based SAN storage infrastructure. In Microsoft Windows Storage Server 2012, with Storage Spaces and using the Scale-out File System, ImageTrend saw an efficient way to lower costs, meet SLAs and provide high availability to their demanding clients.

Leaving SANs for Microsoft’s Storage Spaces with Scale-out File System (SoFS)
One of the first areas they looked at was their storage infrastructure, which was not designed to address their growing needs. ImageTrend also wanted to avoid the incremental annual software fees and replace their aging SAN infrastructure. They knew that their Compellent SAN architecture needed to be migrated to a new model that would support a growing customer base and was designed from the beginning to support cloud and virtualized application environments. One of the most glaring challenges with their old SAN model was the overhead of managing storage to VM connections and mappings.

For example, when migrating VMs, the Compellent SAN required manual intervention to update each volume used by the VM. ImageTrend knew that this model was not sustainable and began to look for alternatives to migrate from an aging and expensive SAN to new software-defined storage system for several reasons:

• The needed system that was designed for scale-out needs
• The ability to support 1000s of VMs today and into the future
• Support their continued move from VMware to Hyper-V
• Leverage a purpose-built and certified storage platform for Microsoft 2012 R2 Storage Spaces
• Reduce storage management overhead and costs
• Leverage their Microsoft server provider status to scale operations at lower costs

One of the key reasons for the move to Microsoft Windows Server 2012 Storage Spaces was the ability to separate the SAN storage pools from the server running the Hypervisor and to utilize dedicated Hyper-V Servers and dedicated SoFS servers. Their previous SAN model tied their storage pools to their hypervisors, hindering their ability to scale and requiring individual updates of every volume used by the VM. Microsoft’s SoFS makes it easy and fast to scale the number of VMs supported with low overhead.
Before migrating to DataON Storage, ImageTrend had three Dell/Compellent SANs saddled with a SAN that would not scale and was driving higher OPEX. To date, they have decommissioned two of the Dell/Compellent SANs and grown their total data pool grow from 100TB to 300TB in the past two years using DataON Storage CiBs and JBODs. ImageTrend continues to plan for more growth.