NxtGen, a leading data center and cloud-based service provider, operates eight data centers and runs two cloud platforms viz. NG4, an AI-ready cloud model and VMware verified cloud platform.
It caters to thousands of customers across sectors, including critical applications for the Indian government. The company takes away the complexity of building and managing IT infrastructure from its customers, and allows them to focus on their core business and applications.
“It is our infrastructure price-performance offering that differentiates us from the competition,” says AS Rajgopal, MD and CEO of NxtGen.
NxtGen pioneered Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) way back in 2014, using commodity server configurations to build integrated storage. However, HCI delivered fixed capacities, and often NxtGen was unable to optimize between compute and storage.
The company was looking to separate compute and storage so that they could grow them independently based on market demand. They also wanted to avoid the use of traditional enterprise solutions like SAN, as they had limitations to scale to thousands of servers.
Tapping 3PAR’s power
NxtGen needed a high storage performance solution to support each physical server, which on an average was running 50 plus virtual servers. The storage demanded millions of Input/ Output Operations Per Second (IOPS) to serve thousands of virtual machines with very low latency.
To upgrade storage performance and capacity, NxtGen decided to opt for HPE’s 3PAR. It started deployment with multiple units, starting with minimum all SSD storage capacity of 240TB. It started small, and then grew each of these storage systems to multiple petabytes.
NxtGen’s team worked with HPE and standardized the deployment architecture. This helped them to train their team, maintain skill sets, and have support from HPE at all times.
NxtGen now has multiple petabytes of storage with zero-downtime. They have 100G Ethernet that runs multiple networks of management, tenant, and storage at very low latencies.
Achieving superior performance
3PAR has significantly helped NxtGen in their storage environment with a minimum increase of 5X in storage performance, and is more flexible compared to a SAN. It can now grow storage and compute environments separately.
“When the storage performance is 5X better, the CPU wait cycles decrease its utilization increases,” says Rajgopal.
NxtGen conducted a third-party study commissioned to evaluate the performance of virtual machines (VMs) of some leading cloud service providers. The storage performance of NxtGen’s VMs have performed extremely well against the other provider VMs, with its 4 vCPU VMs achieving the highest storage performance score based on optimized threading. In addition, even NxtGen’s smallest VMs outperformed other provider VMs regardless of size, class, or volume type.
The largest configuration of a leading cloud service provider gave a 4K random speed with a performance of around 3000 IOPS while the smallest configuration of NxtGen gave 52,000 IOPS.
“All this has been possible because of 3PAR. We have saved on capital expenses. We genuinely believe that it is a great solution with high performance at an affordable price point,” says Rajgopal.
Oops! We could not locate your form.
