Retail chain store Fabindia was looking to use SSDs for faster transaction speeds. An InfiniBand based storage solution helped the company eliminate the interconnect bottleneck By Jasmine Desai
It has long been debated, whether Infiniband can be utilised in certain big data situations and has been compared extensively to FcoE (Fibre Channel over Ethernet) and Ethernet. However, Fabindia has been successful in utilising Infiniband based storage, to get faster transaction speeds. Fabindia, a large Indian retail chain store with over 170 stores across India and abroad, has kept its niche of retailing garments, fabrics, furnishings, handicrafts and ethnic products handmade by craftsmen of rural India. In recent years, it has also ventured into the online space for retailing its product range.
Fabindia’s existing system infrastructure also handled its online transactions from all the stores across India. This infrastructure also gave the retail giant, a view of real-time business transactions and inventory stock from all stores at their central database. However, with the increase in business, the infrastructure was not able to cope with spiraling transactional demands. As the transactions were being made at a central database, the retail stores were facing time lags in completing the customer’s billing.
What’s more, the company had expanded their number of stores recently and did not have sufficient network as well as storage bandwidth to cater to the increased demand. Also, as the company was foraying into the e-commerce space and planning to setup their own website; the management decided to go for a complete overhaul of their data centre to meet their growing storage and network demand. They wanted a solution that would not cause any delays due to heavy traffic demands, and would also make them future-proof in a cost effective manner.
Ideal choice
Envisaging heavy traffic demands, Fabindia wanted an extremely fast storage system with high throughput and bandwidth. Explains Raja Ghosh, Head-IT systems, Fabindia, “Due to heavy traffic, we wanted to adopt SSDs in the storage servers, as SSD can deliver upto 20k to 30k IOPS as compared to a traditional 15k RPM hard-drive, that delivers merely 200 IOPS.” However, the challenge they faced was delivering the high throughput of the SSDs to the central servers, as the throughput gets limited by the interconnect between server and the storage. Since, Fabindia was clear that they wanted a common storage system for their servers and not a storage residing within the servers, they had to select a proper medium of interconnect that could match the throughput of the SSDs in the storage servers, and help deliver the SSD’s high throughput to the main servers. This led them to look for a solution that could be scaled up to meet their anticipated future network and storage needs. What was urgently required, was a central storage solution that would be connected to all their branches across India, for doing online real-time transactions. Thus, Fabindia wanted a high IOPS delivering solution. They selected Opslag FS2, a unified storage solution from Tyrone Systems having InfiniBand as interconnect along with eight blade servers from SuperMicro to host them at their data centre. Opslag FS2 box has 72 bays with InfiniBand ports, of which, 64 bays are populated with SSDs configured on RAID 5 and are used for online transactions. The rest are connected to SAS drives which are used for volume backups. The servers are running on Microsoft Windows Server and haveMS SQL Server as the database server. One major reason for selecting this solution was that the overall cost of ownership with Opslag FS2 storage system along with the InfiniBand backbone, was comparatively lower than that of other competing brands. Also, the pricing model of Tyrone Systems was inclusive of all licenses for all the features provided by the Opslag FS2 unified storage box, so Fabindia did not have to pay any additional charges towards InfiniBand support, which was the case with other competitor products, where the license had to be bought for using InfiniBand feature. After the deployment, Fabindia was able to fulfill their main requirement of high IOPS, as SSDs deliver 20-30k IOPS. Mentions Ghosh, “Now transactional speeds with database servers are fast, and therefore, each store across India is logging their sales activity on real-time basis rather than on a day-end basis.” Any store owner who’s out of stock for a particular item, can now check the inventory status for that item and even know which other store of Fabindia is having the stock of that item. There have also been savings in terms of cost, as InfiniBand is a cost effective solution when compared to Fibre Channel. The transaction completion time has reduced drastically and the downtime have been eliminated completely. Still reaping benefits from the implementation, Fabindia has no specific plans to built-up on this solution.
