performance in spite of ‘noisy
neighbours’ presented us with a constant
challenge,” explained Javier Salcedo
Gadea, Head of Product Management
Cloud, 1&1. “While it was easy enough
for us to add storage nodes thanks to
our SAN setup, adding more customers
made the problem of juggling resource
demands more complex.”
The Solution
As 1&1 continued to grow, it became
clear the company needed to
look beyond traditional storage. It
recognised all-flash, solid-state storage
as the obvious choice to replace the
existing cloud storage infrastructure.
Once 1&1 identified all-flash storage
as the next step, the team quickly
narrowed down a list of vendors.
Their primary consideration was
to reduce the complexity of 1&1’s
storage infrastructure, both in terms of
managing performance and offering
customers a simplified and more
flexible service. 1&1 chose SolidFire for
its next generation storage platform,
which enables the company to control
performance levels to each and every
workload with zero disruption to
customers. What’s more, its in-line
de-duplication and compression
technology would mean 1&1 could
see significant cost benefits over other
solutions. After thoroughly testing
SolidFire’s storage solution, and
following a two-month beta phase, the
advantages of SolidFire’s all-flash arrays
were clear. Not only did the storage
platform greatly simplify end-user
cloud experiences, but it simultaneously
reduced internal complexity —
primarily thanks to SolidFire’s scale-out
architecture and built-in automation.
Future Plans
For an international company like 1&1,
it is important to work with a storage
vendor that is able to deliver its own
global expertise, as well as one that
supports it in delivering easy-to-use,
powerful, and flexible cloud solutions to
its customers. SolidFire will continue to
be an important partner, thanks to its
global reach. As a result of SolidFire’s
scalability, guaranteed performance,
and reliability, 1&1 is now able to
deliver the power and flexibility of an
IT INFRASTRUCTURE
As 1&1 continued to grow, it became clear the company needed to
look beyond traditional storage.
enterprise solution to SMBs with the
simplicity that makes it accessible to
even the smallest business.
SOFTWARE & SERVICES
www.rittal.co.uk
www.netcommseurope.com
NETCOMMS europe Volume V Issue 5 2015 25