Service provider Blackbox Hosting has consolidated storage from two full racks down to just 8U of rack space following migration to Everpure FlashArray hardware. The move has allowed the provider to deliver “sovereign” cloud services with a 10:1 data reduction ratio and an 85% reduction in power utilisation.
Blackbox Hosting evolved over 14 years from a single rack to supporting more than 1,500 virtual machines (VMs), and has datacentre capacity at Canary Wharf with a secondary site in Slough.
The company operates a fully managed, sovereign (see box) model for major software suppliers including Iris Software Group, which supports payroll and financial management for approximately 60% of UK academies.
Blackbox previously relied on HPE 3PAR 8400 all-flash arrays. However, as the hardware approached end-of-life, the company faced mounting challenges.
“Support renewal costs were significant, and we had issues with HPE support,” said Matthew Burden, CEO at Blackbox Hosting. “We had a power supply failure in a DR site, and despite a four-hour SLA [service-level agreement], it took nearly two weeks to replace. They also began charging for firmware updates that were previously included.”
The 3PAR environment was cumbersome, said Burden, and required two full racks of hardware to manage the company’s near-petabyte scale.
When it looked for a more performant and dense alternative, Blackbox turned to Pure Storage, which recently rebranded as Everpure.
High density; ‘one-second’ RPO
Blackbox has deployed a range of Pure Storage FlashArray models across its two datacentres to support its active-passive high-availability design.
The deployment includes two FlashArray//X50 R3s, two X50 R4s, and two FlashArray//C20 units for file clusters.
The hardware supports predominantly Hyper-V and VMware VMs, running 90% Windows-based workloads, primarily SQL Server, plus Linux servers.
The transition from 3PAR to Pure has seen a dramatic consolidation of physical space. “We went from two entire racks filled with disks to two 4U boxes,” said Burden. “Our total provisioned storage is 998TB and we get a total reduction of 10:1. 3PAR had deduplication, but not compression on SSDs.”
Beyond space savings, the disaster recovery (DR) capabilities have seen a massive upgrade. Previously, the company’s recovery point objective (RPO) was limited to 15 minutes. “With Pure Storage, it is one second,” said Durden. “We replicate all 1,500 VMs to our backup datacentre. For a customer with 1,000 VMs, we can spin those up for quarterly testing and they are only one second out from live data.”
Performance and sustainability
The shift to non-volatile memory express-based flash has also provided a significant boost to the provider’s green credentials. Sustainability reports generated via Pure’s Evergreen dashboard show an 85% saving in power utilisation compared with the legacy HPE environment.
For the end users – which include major corporate energy, finance and transport organisations – the benefit is felt in application speed. “We’ve had clients with huge databases that were always slow with previous providers,” said Justin Field, commercial director at Blackbox. “They can pull data significantly faster now, which is a big play for us when competing against hyperscalers.”
Burden also highlighted the “zero-touch” operational simplicity of the new arrays. “The older arrays were very cumbersome; you had to know exactly what you were doing,” he said. “The Pure web interface is very simple, which makes the operational side much easier. Plus, with Evergreen, we don’t have to pull arrays out for upgrades. We can just put in new controllers as scale increases.”
