JustFab Uses DataON Storage and Storage Spaces to Deliver a Highly Available and Cost-Effective Storage Solution

JustFab is a lifestyle brand with over 4 million memberships across their collective websites, processing an average of 3-4 million ERP related transactions per month up to 8 million ERP transactions. In addition to the expanding e-commerce business, they opened six stores in 2015 and plan for 12 more in 2016. Their growth has been astronomical, and their data has exploded along with it, faster than they can accurately predict.

The back-office group at JustFab is responsible for the ERP running Microsoft SQL Server, which shared an expensive Compellent Fibre Channel SAN storage system with the e-commerce team. The performance was substandard, and clearly becoming inadequate. Unfortunately, the storage capacity needed to just maintain the growth pace was cost prohibitive for a growing company; they had to investigate alternatives. In JustFab’s research, they learned that using Microsoft’s Storage Spaces deployed on a highly available clustered platform could give them an estimated 60-70% cost savings over traditional legacy iSCSI or Fibre SAN options. With the majority of successful deployment documentation regarding Hyper-V, not databases, it was a little bit of an unknown to envision the SQL benefits attributed to Storage Spaces. But after the team, led by Erik Nylander, VP of Enterprise Applications, engaged with DataON Storage and proposed a solution to the CEO, “We were told to go for it. And we haven’t looked back since.”

The Solution: DataON Hardware Appliance for Shared Storage in a Condensed Footprint

JustFab performed their POC testing with Microsoft certified JBODs from DataON, featuring storage enclosure awareness and eagerly moved forward with DataON after meeting performance benchmarks for their SQL Server database. “The performance we saw out the DataON SOFS-Platform just destroyed what we were getting out of our legacy solution,” shared Nylander. By implementing a DataON scale-out file server (SOFS) clustered storage platform, JustFab achieved a cost-effective, highly available, scalable and performance-driven solution that will continue to accommodate their rapid and unpredictable growth.

Exceeding Expectations for Microsoft SQL Server

The back-office group at JustFab is primarily Microsoft-centric, focused on SQL Server and Hyper-V. This lead them to consider Microsoft Storage Spaces with clustered storage as an alternative to legacy FC SAN storage implementations. In addition to the lower cost and better performance, an SOFS-Platform is much easier to administer and demands a lot less of the team’s time, especially when compared to complicated SAN or iSCSI. The 60-70% cost savings JustFab achieved for their SQL Server was not the only reason they moved forward with DataON’s scale-up JBOD SOFS-Platform storage. They needed a reliable storage solution with predictable performance to accommodate their SQL Server’s frequent read/writes and a large amount of active data. They also appreciate having the control to scale-out and scale-up the solution as their customer base grows without disrupting the business-critical ERP application. Nylander’s team found all of that and more with their certified DataON SOFS solution for Storage Spaces.

Smart Use of SSDs and CSV Caching for Maximized Performance

Part of the reason for the leap in performance over their SAN solution was the increased use of hot tier storage (SSD), with a final mix of one third hot tier storage utilizing HGST Ultrastar® enterprise-class SAS SSDs, and two-thirds cold tier HGST Ultrastar He8 hard drives. While Microsoft Storage Spaces supports automated tiering across HDD and SSD storage, JustFab has a different formula for success. For Hyper-V, the VMs are it’s strictly SSD or HDD – no tiering. This allows them to utilize Cluster Shared Volume (CSV) Caching, a Microsoft Server 2012 feature that lets you cache read IOPS in the memory of your Hyper-V or Scale-out File Server (SOFS), further improving the performance. Some of their databases are tiered, some are not depending on the application. And SQL log files are always tied to SSD to maximize the overall performance of the database.

Increased Savings and Performance with RDMA Technology

Windows Server 2012 R2 includes a SMB Direct, an enhanced the Server Message Block (SMB) protocol to leverage the capabilities of RDMA interconnect technologies. RDMA, or Remote Direct Memory Access, is a Microsoft-centric technology that allows for a system to bypass the CPU of a remote machine to access its memory, making the read or write exceptionally fast without consuming CPU resources to provide greater performance, scale and increased Hyper-V VM density. JustFab chose to improve its network infrastructure with support for RDMA by implementing a 56Gb Infiniband (IB) connection, which can provide the low latency of 200 nanoseconds compared to Ethernet.

Since the move to SMB Direct with InfiniBand from Mellanox Technologies, they’ve never experienced an outage. Coupled with a 12GB/s SAS designed and RDMA supported Infiniband networking, the DataON SOFS-Platform has helped to ensure database consistency and easily outperforms traditional SAN infrastructures with an improved TCO.

Why DataON was Chosen

Cost and performance were top considerations when it came to choosing a solution. But JustFab also appreciated working with a certified Microsoft storage partner they could be confident in for Microsoft Storage Spaces design, deployment and ongoing support. Because of the overwhelming success with DataON for the SQL Server, several other IT teams across JustFab chose to invest in a Windows Server 2012 R2 architecture. These additional business units found the simplicity of a Microsoft certified hyper-converged Cluster-in-a-Box (CIB) appliance for their applications including e-commerce, digital asset management, and business intelligence (BI). The DataON CiB-9224 V12 hyper-converged platform delivers highly-available services and shared storage in an energy saving, condensed footprint, perfect for these teams who needed a high performing solution that was simple to deploy and manage.

Next Steps

As other groups across JustFab’s IT organization begin to hit the limits of their legacy SAN storage and look to upgrade or retire those systems, the majority will move to storage stacks similar to the DataON solutions put in place by Nylander’s teams. In addition, JustFab is looking forward to new functionality in the upcoming Microsoft Server 2016 that will help them continue to move towards a converged network that runs entirely on InfiniBand. “We transfer so much data around, sometimes the 10G network gets bottlenecked for us,” said Nylander. And Storage Replica, brand new functionality in MS 2016 for synchronous data replication and disaster recovery, is an area they intend to explore as a way to inject more resiliency into their infrastructure.