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delivering the goods

From STORAGE Magazine Vol 6, Issue 7 - September 2006

With many independent software vendors now promising 100% service level agreements, the question that needs to be resolved is: ‘can they actually deliver on their promise’?

In the case of Gyron Internet, the company asserts that it has unfailingly met its commitment to a 100% Service Level Agreements, with 24/7 phone and email support, for more than two years. An enviable record, for any business.

According to Gyron director Robin Balen, the reason for this is simple. "Not many companies do what we do. There are smaller companies, but they tend not to have the level of investment in 24-hour staffing and support. Others are huge - £100 million-plus companies where customers are just another CRM number.
“We believe we strike the right balance between investment in leading-edge technology and good, old-fashioned, personal service. Our customer base is relatively small, but very active, and their expectations of both our service level and our technology are extremely high."

Most of Gyron's customers depend on the company's managed service to outsource some, or all, of their critical IT infrastructure, including servers, storage & VoIP telephony. The company's collocation package embraces redundant storage and backup, which would simply be uneconomical for customers to consider in-house. Balen explains. "Many of our customers offer web-hosting, high-performance database management or media services, applications where speed is a critical factor. Others run mail servers and VoIP switchboards where the issue is more about reliability. For both types of customer, support is crucial."

Gyron claims to have one of the best support networks in the industry and says that the hardware choices they have made are a significant aspect of this, enabling them to factor in the service levels that they live up to and maintain. With its reputation riding on its 100% SLA and 24/7 promise, Gyron must have absolute confidence in its technology, along with a significant level of investment in hardware to guarantee that there is no single point of failure.

The company builds its own custom super micro servers, with Corsair matched memory and Western Digital hard disks. It has also installed 3ware RAID controllers, initially with 8000 series and later the 9500 series, to eliminate downtime and data loss in the event of a drive problem.

"Before we switched to 3ware RAID controllers," says Balen, "our biggest issue was hard-drive reliability. A drive failure could take the system down for six hours or more, but RAID eliminates the problem."

The decision to upgrade to the 3ware 9550SX RAID controllers from AMCC was based on its customers' need for speed and reliability. At 380MB/sec for RAID 5 writes and 800MB/s for RAID 5 reads, the 9550SX is 200% faster than the previous generation of RAID controllers. Wire speed is 3Gb/s and the card's features include dynamic cache allocation to boost multi-stream sequential I/O and, currently, either 4-port or 8-port multi-lane connectivity. Another big factor in choosing 3ware was that they are one of the few RAID controller companies actively to support Linux and Open Source.

At first, Gyron customers were a little slow to buy into the benefits of RAID, but now 95% of them are 3ware RAID controller converts. The response has been so positive that, on the morning the 9550SX was launched, Gyron had calls from customers asking when the company was going to be installing them. Fortunately, Gyron had already been trialling the 3ware controllers and decided to move all of its servers to the new-generation cards.

"Factoring the cost of ten minutes of downtime against the cost of a SATA RAID card is a no-brainer for most of our customers and many of them actively market the fact that they use 3ware," adds Balen.

Looking back at the transition to the 9550SX, Balen recalls: "There were a few driver issues getting the 9550SX to work with the whole system, but 3ware provided all-night support from both the UK and US, and even replicated our servers so that they could carry out tests themselves. Now the 9550SX and the 3ware management tools we use integrate well with existing server monitoring tools."

Reviewing the performance of the new cards, Balen comments: "The earlier 3ware controllers were good and the new family is another massive improvement. We can see a clear difference in performance in the real world, particularly when using servers online"

Looking forward, Balen is anticipating the deployment of the 16-port card, which he describes as 'gold dust'.

"This card is more hardcore and can support serious amounts of storage. It is likely that Gyron will use the 4-port 3ware cards in our servers, and for large storage and back-up, with the new 16-port 3ware RAID controller for extra redundancy." ST