CDN Light: Build an Efficient Hyper-Converged Data Center Based on SandStone USP

Huizhou CDN Industrial Development Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as CDN Light), founded in 2005, is a professional and systematic lighting solution service provider integrating design, production, marketing and services. CDN Light is committed to becoming the most professional lighting system service provider in the world, combining the functions, appearance, quality and light efficiency of the products, and completing the product research and development in series. So far, CDN Light has reached strategic cooperation with the top 10 most valuable hotel brands in the world and 54 of the top 100 real-estate companies in China. With the development of business, the data volume and storage pressure is ever increasing on the e-commerce sales platform, so CDN Light adopted SandStone USP (SandStone Unified Storage Platform) to ease the pressure of the e-commerce platform and new applications to be released in the future on the expansion of computing and storage resources.

In order to maintain high-speed and stable development, CDN Light has been vigorously developing sales channels and established an Internet sales platform in conformity with the trend of “Internet +”. The new business mode has brought new vitality, but it also has brought more challenges to the information construction. CDN Light has deployed such an infrastructure of “servers + traditional storage devices” and also VMware server virtualization for flexible expansion of applications.

With more and more channels and customers placing orders through the Internet platform, the x86 servers bearing the front-end business system of the e-commerce platform have been expanded to four sets and the pressure is ever increasing on database and storage, which has become the main bottleneck affecting the front-end business response time. However, the existing IT infrastructure can not meet the needs of future development due to a series of compulsory problems, such as difficult architecture expansion, individual storage failures and complex management.

After comparison and testing of various solutions, CDN Light finally adopted SandStone unified storage platform , used Intel® SSD and traditional hard disks to have formed multi-level storage, and constructed a hyper-converged IT architecture characterized by on-demand allocation and resource flexible expansion based on VMware, which has solved the problem of business system construction brought by the rapid business expansion of CDN Light and eased the pressure of the e-commerce platform and new applications to be released in the future on the expansion of computing and storage resources.

By deploying SandStone unified storage platform , CDN Light has effectively improved the expansibility and resource utilization of the architecture, achieved better storage performance and higher availability, and greatly improved the efficiency in operation and maintenance management:

It is easy to build a flexible hyper-converged infrastructure: The cluster can be expanded from 3 nodes to 1024 nodes at most; based on the online expansion provided by SandStone distributed storage system, new nodes can be added to the existing cluster only on the management page to achieve the overall linear increase of CPU, memory, storage I / O and so on.

High storage performance: Data can be stored to local solid-state drive (SSD) in layers at the price of traditional hard disks, which has eased the pressure on the demands of e-commerce platforms and new applications for storage resources during promotion.

Higher availability of storage: SandStone distributed storage uses a decentralized architecture and the data is also stored with multiple copies at different nodes, so damages of individual nodes will have no impact on the overall architecture, which has improved the overall availability of the system and better ensured the 24-hour uninterrupted operation of the business.

Higher efficiency in operation and maintenance management: SandStone distributed storage is powerful in operation and maintenance management. On its Web-like interface, the CPU, memory, network, IOPS and bandwidth usage can be intuitively available at each node, which can facilitate performance optimization, able to support SNMP and email alarm, etc.