ETA2U announces the successful completion of a new project executed for Electrica Transilvania Nord. The project targeted the implementation of a Flash acceleration solution for the virtual environment, aimed at boosting the performance of the applications used in the company, by improving the response times and the storage system access times.

To reach the objectives of the project, the existing VMware vSphere 5.5 cluster was equipped with one PCI Flash Card for each server, in order to accelerate the virtual machines both for the “write” and for the “read” operations. A Pernix Data solution was used in this case, a solution deemed “Best in Class” by the VMware Users' community.

Some of the essential advantages of the employed solution are:

  • Keeping virtual servers intact and unchanged. No agent or driver is installed in the virtual machine for the flash acceleration. All the operations are performed directly by a hypervisor.
  • Compatibility with Beneficiary's SAN Infrastructure. Given that Electrica Translivania Nord uses a SAN solution built around the IBM Storage Virtualization Controller technology, connected to a IBM DS series storage capacity and a SAN network having around 100 Fibre Channel ports, the implementation of our solution did not require the alteration of the parameters and the configuration of the SAN structure.
  • Virtual Machine-level Granularity. For every single Virtual Machine, regardless of the operating system being used, a Flash acceleration function may be accessed, without the need for vMotion operations on other LUNs.
  • The Flash acceleration solution is compatible with all the VMware vSphere versions, with any operating system used in the virtual servers and any SAN infrastructure (by any producer, using FC, iSCSI or NFS access protocols).

The Flash acceleration solution was implemented on an already operational infrastructure where virtual machines ran in a production environment. The downtime needed in order to perform all the specific operations was very low, amounting to a few minutes.

We are honored to have had the opportunity to successfully conclude a project of such impact and we are glad to have had the occasion to work with Electrica Transilvania Nord, a provider of electric power accompanied by modern and efficient services, i.e. added value for our clients.

Cristian Leoveanu
ETA2U, Business Unit Director