Case Study: Software-defined storage for ReadSoft – a business automation software developer

To meet the demand for growing data storage needs, ReadSoft – a global provider of applications for automating business processes, required a solution with higher performance that is exceptionally scalable, easy to set up, and very secure. Satisfied with existing storage software, ReadSoft decided to upgrade to software-defined Open-E JovianDSS which is based on ZFS. This simple switch allowed the company to achieve 4x faster performance and to store 60-80% more on each SAN.

The Business Challenge

ReadSoft’s software extracts information from business documents and uses it for automated document sorting, information matching against ERP systems, and approval workflows. For quite a long time, ReadSoft was using Open-E DSS V7 in many different locations (Hamburg, Frankfurt, Stockholm, Malmö, Helsingborg and Copenhagen) as fast iSCSI storage in VMware cluster environments for all research and development data. With Open-E software, they were very satisfied with intuitive navigation and easy management of complicated server infrastructure. But the company rapidly grew and so did their R&B requirements. This meant that ReadSoft’s IT infrastructure needed a refreshment. Ultimately, the company started to seek a proven solution that will allow to achieve increased performance and can be easily expanded. Ideally, the new solution was to be certified for VMware environments. Of course, any single points of failure were to be avoided, especially in terms of RAID controllers.

Open-E JovianDSS solution

ReadSoft went ahead with their already proven storage developer and decided to switch to Open-E JovianDSS. Now, the company’s storage administrators benefit from much higher performance and better insights into SAN and disks. With Open-E JovianDSS, they increased the overall efficiency and have a better way of monitoring multiple disk problems. With the new High Availability storage environment, ReadSoft was able to achieve Business Continuity and aggregate resources into virtual pools in the company’s VMware cluster.

When it comes to the hardware setup, all of ReadSoft’s existing hardware – 21 SANs in total – was replaced with HP DL360 servers. Currently the company’s storage solution runs on a 10GB network and the infrastructure includes HP DL360 servers connected with HP d2700 cabinet that consists of 25 SAS 10k rpm disks in a JBOD configuration. Plus, they use Intel DC3700 series disks for SSD cache that are mounted directly in the servers.

The Results

“We have been very satisfied with Open-E DSS V7 for many years but after our company and our requirements for R&D were growing faster and faster, we were looking for ways to increase our performance with proven products and relationships. Finally, Open-E released their new software JovianDSS with ZFS on Linux. With this, we were able to achieve non-performance degradation compression that allows us to store 60 to 80% more on each SAN. Since 90% of requests are running from the cache we achieved four times faster performance than with the old storage systems.”

Per Eklund, Head of IT at ReadSoft