// Case Study

SysEleven Improves IaaS Flexibility with Hyperconverged Infrastructure and Intel® Technology

HCI enables SysEleven to provide customers with reliable public and private cloud solutions

The challenge

To meet growing customer demand for container orchestration and management, SysEleven needed to design IaaS based on an OpenStack cloud environment, that would serve as the base infrastructure for customers’ managed Kubernetes clusters. The company wanted to create a hyperconverged hardware design, where compute and storage are combined in a single server and could run as a private cloud or in a hyperscaler environment in the background. In a Kubernetes environment, virtual instances typically need access to multiple volumes. In order to fulfill this requirement, SysEleven needed a new, high-performance central shared storage system.

About SysEleven

For its OpenStack cloud and the MetaKube managed Kubernetes service, SysEleven has combined a just-right mix of various Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors that provide the reliability and high performance customers expect.
For the Kubernetes cluster shared storage, SysEleven chose a software-defined, all-flash design using a combination of two varieties of Intel® 3D NAND SSDs.
The choice of Intel® technologies for building out SysEleven’s services was based on total cost of ownership (TCO) calculations and performance benchmarks conducted by SysEleven engineers.

The Result

The new all-flash shared storage system is expected to reduce storage TCO by 75 percent, compared to a proprietary storage system. This significant cost saving results from focusing on non-use-case-specific hardware and high-performance Intel® components. Also, the ability to combine compute and storage into a single, hyperconverged infrastructure is highly cost efficient, but more importantly can handle a broad variety of use cases in one bare metal design. The solution is eminently scalable; SysEleven can easily add nodes to a cluster on the fly, with no downtime.

75% reduction of tco

for shared storage

variety use cases handled in one bare metal design

easily add notes

on the fly

One Infrastructure for many needs

Although the adoption of containerization technology is expanding, deploying and managing containers can represent a significant challenge. One of SysEleven’s goals is to provide Kubernetes cluster orchestration and management for its customers. But because some customers run in SysEleven’s OpenStack cloud, with or without Kubernetes orchestration, some run on hyperscaler infrastructure with SysEleven’s Kubernetes orchestration, and others prefer on-premises deployment, SysEleven’s internal compute and storage resources must be flexible. In addition, SysEleven has received many requests for shared storage driven by a strong demand on Kubernetes orchestrated virtual environments. To accelerate business, SysEleven needed to provide flexible, reliable and high-performance compute and cost-efficient shared storage.

Combining Hyperconverged Infrastructure with Affordable Shared Storage

SysEleven did not want to create several hardware designs for its customers’ various deployment scenarios. Instead, SysEleven chose to integrate several processors into the same bare metal infrastructure. For its IaaS based on an OpenStack Cloud environment, the base infrastructure for managed Kubernetes clusters is a hyperconverged hardware setup. Servers are primarily two-socket, equipped with Intel® Xeon® Gold 6240 processors and four Intel® SSD DC P4610 Series (92 TB). In 2019, SysEleven deployed 28 of these nodes. For customers using SysEleven’s IaaS as a virtual private server system, nodes use the Intel® Xeon® Gold 6140 processor.

A regular SysEleven customer setup consists of a network with multiple worker nodes with direct mounts of several different storage types. With a Kubernetes orchestration many “Pods” are running on one worker node. In order to support data storage in such an environment storage with the “read/write many” capability is mandatory. Instead of going with an expensive proprietary shared storage solution, SysEleven elected to use software-defined storage to combine two different commodity, all-flash storage types in one solution: 50 Intel® SSD DC P4610 Series and 300 Intel® SSD DC P4500 Series—saving up to 75 percent on TCO.¹

While setting up the software-defined orchestration for two storage types was a bit tricky, it is seamless for SysEleven’s customers. SysEleven’s managed Kubernetes can mount these shares in Kubernetes Pods.

Offering hyperconverged infrastructure for IaaS combined with all-flash, affordable shared storage is a differentiator for SysEleven and meets an important customer need. SysEleven has deployed 20 nodes (equipped with Intel® Xeon® Silver 4214 processors) of this new offering.

“Our customers request the performance advantage of Intel® technology-based CPUs, and the operation of Intel-based virtual structures in a homogeneous data center environment is very efficient.”

Jens Plogsties

Head of Infrastructure, SysEleven