CASE STUDY
and tens of thousands of fibre-optic lines,
allowing for the delivery of a full range of
value-added services. those when we designed the system on one
hand and when we scouted for the right
technology on the other hand.
Bezeq has installed more than 1.6 million
high-speed retail and wholesale broadband
lines and enables broadband high-speed
services, advanced IP telephony and OTT
TV services. Broadband services over the
NGN network can reach up to 100 Megabits
per second and enable consumers to enjoy
the most advanced telecommunications
and content services. We had already migrated our central storage
to all flash array and applications like DWH,
that demand high performance, will be
established on Excelero infrastructure (NVMe
storage devices).
What were the key challenges Bezeq
was looking to address ahead of
selecting Excelero? How do your customers benefit from
the solution?
We wanted the flexibility to expand the
storage layer of our DWH infrastructure. We
also wanted performance improvement, to
reduce our OPEX and CAPEX, prevent lock into
hardware vendor and establish a new storage
shared layer for new applications with high
performance demands (instead of internal
devices without sharing and protection).
Why did you choose to work with
Excelero and why did you opt for this
specific solution?
Intelligent CIO Europe spoke to Igal
Muginstein, Storage and Backup Team
Manager at Bezeq, to find out more about
the solution and its benefits.
Can you provide some background on
Bezeq and its company objectives?
Bezeq is Israel’s leading telecommunications
service provider. Established in 1984, the
company has led Israel into the new era
of telecommunications, based on the
most advanced technologies and services.
Bezeq fixed-line offers domestic services
including Internet infrastructure services,
basic telephony, transmission and data
communications as well as cloud and
digital services.
The fixed-line infrastructure comprises
an NGN (Next Generation Network) –
FTTC (Fibre-to-the-Curb) network – with
approximately 1.8 million access lines
www.intelligentcio.com
The Excelero solution was the only one
we found to fit our performance demands
(at least 15GBytes/sec) based on block
storage. Excelero provided the flexibility
to choose the most suitable and cost-
effective commodity hardware for Bezeq’s
requirements, eliminating vendor lock-in.
The company also offered collaboration
with the local development team and made
adjustments to our OS and DB platform.
We can achieve the same high-level
performance of local NVMe devices over
centralised, redundant networked storage.
We have established high performance
DRP for DWH (lower cost and same
performance as production environment)
as well as reduced run times by an average
of 30% compared to internal Fusion
IO devices or the legacy all-flash array
environment, and in some workloads,
reduced run times up to 90%.
Are there any trends/emerging
trends you expect to see in the data
storage space of which infrastructure
managers should be aware?
I believe that modern data centre storage
infrastructure has to be based on all-flash
array for traditional loads and scalable
high-performance NVME-over fabric for high
performance applications.
The second trend we expect will be
object storage for unstructured data
and backup silos.
How was the implementation process
– did you encounter any challenges,
if so, how were these resolved? New NAS solutions have to combine high
performance and collaboration needs (we
implemented CTERA solution – software
with flash devices and Internet access to
portal with object storage).
The main challenge was to adjust a modern
solution like NVMESH to a relatively low OS
version and Oracle version. The Excelero
team developed a special version for those
limitations (only RAID 10 instead of RAID 5)
that could be configured with higher versions. Combination of storage and backup
products for CDP demands, instant
recovery, WORM solutions (software with
object storage).
How far has the system future-
proofed the organisation?
The greater question is that of meeting the
company’s future needs and we considered
In summary, what are the key
benefits of the solution?
High performance, cost-savings, simplicity
and scalability, and eliminating hardware
vendor lock-in. n
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