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Performance

The following object storage case study highlights some of the key benefits a partnership with Loadbalancer.org can bring when maximum performance is essential.

• Object storage is becoming the go-to solution for businesses with massive data warehousing needs
• With data storage needs escalating at an ever increasing rate, system scalability is a key requirement for many users
• Increasing data loads require a corresponding increase in speed and performance
• Load balancing is an essential ingredient in successful object storage deployments

The challenge

A major research laboratory in the United Kingdom has been conducting research on the environment and undertaking data analysis to monitor changes within it. Day after day, the research center amasses new data from sensors, satellites and researchers and processes sophisticated data models, to gain vitally important environmental intelligence. All this data needs to be backed up securely, so that it can be used to raise awareness of the impacts of humankind on the global environment and contribute towards its sustainable stewardship.

The laboratory selected the Dell EMC ECS object-based storage platform, to enable it to back up its data to disks on premise. All Dell EMC ECS solutions require compatible load balancers to distribute the inbound workload across the nodes in the ECS platform and maximize performance. With its exceptionally high data volumes, however, the research center needed a load balancer that could offer a particularly high throughput speed. “The load balancer initially proposed was not fit for purpose, because it had a licensing model that artificially limited the throughput,” recalls the center’s Chief Information Officer (CIO). “As a result, we would not have been able to complete all our backups quickly enough”.

The benefits

• Strong experience in load balancing object-based storage solutions.
• Unlimited throughput, to support large data volumes.
• Reliable performance for daily backups of tens of terabytes of data.
• Effortless handling of exceptional peaks in data volumes.
• The capacity to load balance other business systems for no additional cost.

The solution

The research laboratory selected Loadbalancer.org as its load balancer vendor, because the company offered solutions that could deliver the speed it needed, at an affordable price. Critically, Loadbalancer.org does not limit throughput on its load balancers with restrictive license agreements and has specialist experience of load balancing in object-based storage platforms. “Straight away, Loadbalancer.org demonstrated that its solutions could work with Dell EMC ECS storage solutions,” says the center’s CIO. “It ticked all our commercial and technical boxes.”

To complement its existing virtualized IT infrastructure, the charity selected a virtualized load balancer, the Loadbalancer.org Enterprise VA MAX. “The Loadbalancer.org virtualized solution is very easy and straightforward to set up and manage,” the CIO says. “Within less than an hour of downloading the Loadbalancer.org software, we had a working load balancer installed with our Dell EMC ECS storage platform.”