CUSTOMER PROFILE

Founded in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, in May of 2000, Cartika, Inc. is a leading open-source application service provider. Combin-ing advanced Web-hosting facilities with intricate knowledge of best-of-breed open-source applications, Cartika provides a full range of hosting solutions for every size company, from small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) to the largest enterprises and Web-based brands. The CartikaHosting division offers on-demand hosting services via CartikaCloud.com, an innovative, high-availability Linux® and Windows® hosting service featuring utility-based billing, an easy-to-use Web interface, and expert client assistance. (www.cartikahosting.com and www.cartikacloud.com)

THE CHALLENGE

Implement fluid, efficient storage architecture for unpredictable workloadsIn 2009, Cartika set out to bring robust yet affordable cloud services to the masses. The goal was to give businesses of all sizes access to minute or massive amounts of IT infrastructure on demand, letting companies pay for only what they use, only when they use it. The difficulty for Cartika came in right-sizing but not overinvesting in an infrastructure that could handle such completely unpredictable workloads.

Andrew Rouchotas, chief executive officer at Cartika, Inc., says, “We didn’t know how much and at what rate our business would grow; what the processing demand would be; what usage would look like at 100, 1,000, and 10,000 nodes; what data access patterns would be; or how much storage we’d need. The challenge was to build a highly elastic computing and hosting model without overbuilding or wasting the infra-structure we bought. The risk was in pricing ourselves out of our target market—that is, any business, large or small, relying on a Web presence for its revenue streams.”

To meet requirements for availability and performance, dynamic provisioning, utiliza-tion, and manageability on the server side, Cartika made the decision to build the CartikaCloud service on an enterprise-class Citrix XenServer virtualization platform. For storage, the company required: 1) integration with XenServer; 2) high availability clustering; 3) nondisruptive scalability; 4) automated provisioning and data protection; 5) fast, space-efficient backup and mirroring; and 6) low total cost of ownership (TCO).

KEY HIGHLIGHTS

IndustryIT services

The challengeImplement fluid storage architecture to handle unpredictable loads of on-demand cloud services.

The solutionDeliver enterprise-grade elasticity, scalability, and high availability with NetApp® storage for Citrix-based CartikaCloud hosting services

Benefits• Deliveraround-the-clockavailability• Provideseamless,no-waste

scalability• Use50%lesscapacityforvirtual

machines• Automateprocessestomanage

heavy demand• Increaseadminefficiency100%

Cartika Takes on-Demand Cloud Services to the Masses with Citrix/NetApp ElasticityPlusEfficiency

Success Story

“NetApp technology, combined with low TCO, helps us offer advantages that our competitors don’t have or can’t deliver as efficiently. NetApp deduplication, for example, lets us use 50%lesscapacityforvirtualmachines,withcorresponding savings in real estate, power, and cooling. This lowers our cost of goods sold. PassingoursavingsalongmakesCartikaCloudservices accessible to more businesses.”Andrew Rouchotas Chief Executive Officer, Cartika, Inc.

THE SOLUTION

Deliver elasticity, scalability, and high availability with enterprise-grade NetApp storage for CartikaCloudRouchotas indicates that of the multiple solutions, including Dell EqualLogic, evaluated by Cartika, only NetApp met all the require-ments. “Comparing functionality as well as three-year TCO, we found NetApp to be the obvious choice. Every other solution we considered had limitations—in hardware-level redundancy, in space efficiency, scal-ability, manageability, or in TCO. Only NetApp offered the unique combination of elasticity and efficiency that would allow us to meet performance requirements without wasting infrastructure or overburdening IT staff.”

Today, NetApp serves as the storage back-bone for the CartikaCloud hosting service that features a redundant and self-healing architecture with scalable and on-demand capacity. Designed to provide highly available, easily accessible pay-as-you-use services for any-size enterprise, the CartikaCloud service supports both Linux- and Microsoft® Windows–based platforms.

NetApp high-availability FAS3140 and FAS2040 systems at Cartika’s primary hosting facility in Dallas, Texas, provide some 28TB of SATA capacity to the Citrix XenServer environment running on a server

farm currently comprised of more than 250CPUs.NetAppsingle-boxmultiprotocolsupports both iSCSI (for standard cloud services) and NFS (for legacy load-balanced clients) storage repositories. Ongoing services are provided by Softchoice Corporation, aNetAppCorporateResellerPartnerandprovider of IT solutions and services across boththeU.S.andCanada.

To increase efficiency and support demand-ing service-level agreements (SLAs), Cartika utilizes NetApp Operations Manager software for single-console storage monitoring and management.TheNetAppProtectionManager tool enables automated data protection.

Together these tools simplify common tasks and allow Cartika to automate processes that would otherwise be overly time con-suming and costly to administer in the complex and dynamic cloud environment. Cartika makes use of the NetApp tools to maintain integrity and to predictably ascer-tain where and when to build out the cloud, determining which resources are needed before bottlenecks develop.

NetApp supports the CartikaCloud appli-cation environment that at any time can be running thousands of proprietary, commer-cial, and open-source Linux and Windows applications such as Microsoft® Exchange ServerandOfficeSharePoint® Server,

WordPressopen-sourcepublishing,contentmanagement,VoiceoverInternetProtocol,e-commerce, and customer relationship management systems. Cartika, Inc. also leverages the cloud infrastructure for its own business applications, including mission-critical domain name system (DNS) services, VoIP,assetmanagement,andhelpdesksystems. “We expect within the next 12 to 24 months to be running our entire business on the CartikaCloud,” adds Rouchotas.

BUSINESS BENEFITS

Innovation—more services to more businessesRouchotas attributes the faster-than-forecasted growth of the CartikaCloud business to the company’s ability to deliver innovation—in this case, affordable, on-demand cloud services for companies of any size. He says, “Building our cloud services on the Citrix/NetApp infrastructure allows us to deliver performance, availability, and 360° scalabil-ity—thatis,clientscanaddorremoveCPU,RAM, disk, and bandwidth resources on demand from a control panel and pay daily or monthly for that utilization. To deliver such flexibility in a highly unpredictable environ-ment, we need the seamless scalability that this infrastructure affords, as well as the Citrix Essentials for XenServer and NetApp tools that make it easier for us to allocate and manage resources.”

The virtualization awareness inherent in NetApp arrays and the ability to directly control storage features from XenServer facilitate Cartika’s management of the infrastructure.TheNetAppManageONTAP® Software Developer’s Kit (SDK) that includes NetApp’s suite of application programming interfaces simplifies integration with Citrix management tools.

Another critical NetApp differentiator is the ability to nondisruptively add capacity under a common storage pool to maximize utiliza-tion of resources. “Launching this service on NetApp gave us the confidence that in 6 or 12 months we weren’t going to hit I/O issues that we couldn’t address,” remarks Rouchotas. “And, although other solutions have consid-erations for Citrix interoperability, NetApp offers more seamless and efficient integration with Citrix virtual private server solutions.”

Efficiency for small and medium businessesCartikaCloud gives businesses immediate access to advanced functionality without heavy capital outlay or protracted deploy-ment—Rouchotas points out that customers can access CartikaCloud resources within just minutes. Because clients share the infrastructure and pay only for services and resources they use, every customer can realize savings, whether it’s a small business

running all of its Web services on the cloud or a large enterprise off-loading segments of services.

Key to keeping costs down is Cartika’s ability to deliver services without significant manual intervention. “We have dramatically reduced the IT staff hours we originally allocated to managing storage for the CartikaCloud services,” Rouchotas relates. “In fact, using NetApp has increased our administrative efficiencyby100%.AnotherbenefitofNetApp manageability is that any of our technical staff can administer our entire storage foot-print. We probably only need one person to manage the NetApp—it pretty much runs itself—but we need every technician to know how. We’re a 24x7 services business and require all of our IT staff to be able to administer all elements of the infrastructure.

“NetApp technology, combined with low total cost of ownership, helps us offer advantages that our competitors don’t have or can’t deliver as efficiently. NetApp dedu-plication technology, for example, lets us use 50%lesscapacityforvirtualmachines,withcorresponding savings in data center real estate, power, and cooling. This lowers our costofgoodssold.Passingoursavingsalong makes CartikaCloud services accessible and affordable to more businesses, particu-larly the SMB customers that we support.”

Performance for Web giantsAt the other end of the spectrum from SMBs are Cartika’s enterprise customers, among them some of the world’s most recognized organizations and largest Web sites, includ-ing Monster.com. For these users, the CartikaCloud must deliver performance and capacity to accommodate huge surges in Web traffic. “Citrix NetScaler load balancer helps us distribute the processing, and NetApp lets us quickly and efficiently provi-sion capacity on demand. If we were doing that job manually, it would be impossible to keep up with the spikes.”

Resilience and benefits for allFor all Cartika customers, high-availability cloud services are essential. To provide both resilience and efficiency, Cartika deployed NetApp active-active configurations with multipath HA that provides redundant paths between storage controllers and disks. Rouchotas states, “We typically SLA four-nines availability on individual services and 100%uptimeonnetworkandserverhard-ware. Achieving this necessitates inherently reliable hardware and redundancy across the infrastructure. That’s another area where NetApp contributes hardware-level protection with unique efficiency. We can configure an active-active controller on a pair of NetApp storage controllers and let each service its own workload—NFS across one controller,

NetApp creates innovative storage and data management solutions that deliver outstanding cost efficiency and accelerate performance breakthroughs. Discover our passion for helping companies around the world go further, faster at www.netapp.com.www.netapp.com

© Copyright 2010 NetApp, Inc. All rights reserved. No portions of this document may be reproduced without prior written consent of NetApp, Inc. Specifications are subject to change without notice. NetApp, theNetApplogo,Gofurther,faster,ManageONTAP,SnapMirror,and Snapshot are trademarks or registered trademarks of NetApp, Inc.intheUnitedStatesand/orothercountries.LinuxisaregisteredtrademarkofLinusTorvalds.Microsoft,Windows,andSharePointareregistered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation. All other brands or products are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders and should be treated as such. CSS-6295-0310

iSCSI across the other, for example. If one controller fails, the second can automatically assume the other’s workload. A competitive storage product, by requiring the second controller to be a dedicated slave, would have given us half the efficiency during normal operations.

“We also take advantage of NetApp Snapshot™ point-in-time copy technology for rapid backup/recovery and will use NetApp SnapMirror ® software for bandwidth-efficient replication of data and instances between our Dallas network operations center and a second facility in Toronto. Our plan is to spread the cloud across two geographies to provideservicesinboththeU.S.andCanada,to ensure portability of CartikaCloud ser-vices, and to enable disaster recovery.”

The Cartika team understands firsthand the advantages of deploying applications on the cloud infrastructure. “We’ve realized immea-surable benefits from running many of our own critical systems like DNS services on the CartikaCloud,” Rouchotas reports. “The cloud offers inherent availability, and we can granularly add resources wherever needed to ensure services are not impacted. In the past, a single RAM chip or hard drive failure could bring down DNS or other important services like our helpdesk. There’s no ques-tion that our ability to service customers on a day-to-day basis has been enhanced. Cartika is committed to delivering the best cloud services and the best customer service—the Citrix-on-NetApp infrastructure helps us do both.”

“Building our cloud services on the Citrix/NetApp infrastructure allows us to deliver performance, availability, and 360° scalability. To deliver such flexibility in a highly unpredictable environment, we need the seamless scalability that this infrastructure affords, as well as the Citrix and NetApp tools that make it easier for us to allocate and manage resources.”Andrew Rouchotas Chief Executive Officer, Cartika, Inc.

SOLUTION COMPONENTS

NetApp productsNetApp HA FAS3140 and FAS2040 systems

NetApp deduplication and SnapMirror technologies

NetApp Operations Manager and ProtectionManagersoftware

NetApp Manageability SDK

ProtocolsNetApp SAN (iSCSI)/NAS (NFS)

EnvironmentCitrix XenServer, CloudLinux, Windows 2003

PartnerSoftchoice www.softchoice.com