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Expanding Maritime Remote Condition Monitoring Firm Finds a New Storage Paradigm

21st Century Mayday Call Answered

ESRG, a data analysis and remote monitoring technology firm, had begun to experience serious problems managing storage of growing data sets. The company provides real-time equipment analytics to the commercial maritime and defense naval sectors.

Their first attempt to solve the problem involved purchasing a NetApp® FAS2200, which worked well but quickly ran out of space, leaving them back at square one. After finding it would be prohibitively expensive to add a disk shelf to the NetApp system, they investigated other options that fit their budget and need for scalability. The Stax StorCore, an enterprise-level software-defined storage platform based on open-source ZFS technology and powered by NexentaStor, fits these needs. The storage solution provided was easily scaled as budget and demand required over the next two years.

Developed by Bothell, WA-based Silicon Mechanics, the zStax StorCore line of unified storage appliances is built on industry-standard hardware, and use a software-defined storage model. The highly scalable, modular approach of zStax appliances will easily support ESRG’s growing software as a service (SaaS) business requirements.

Real-time inventory management and analytics

ESRG supports remote condition monitoring and analytics for assets in the commercial maritime, offshore oil and gas, and naval defense sectors. ESRG’s OstiaEdge® Monitoring Suite platform enables owners, managers, and operators to use the real-time data generated by sensors in onboard equipment to make better maintenance and operations decisions, both onboard and onshore.

OstiaEdge’s automated analytics enable optimization of fuel and energy consumption, increased reliability and uptime, reduction of maintenance costs, identification of potential issues prior to failure, and automation of data collection for regulatory purposes.

Predictive equipment health analytics identify issues before failure, enabling operators to move from scheduled maintenance to as-needed condition-based maintenance (CBM) to avoid downtime, reduce costs, and improve customer satisfaction.

OstiaEdge’s automated equipment health analytics use real time data to make better maintenance and operations decisions.

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Expanding Maritime Remote Condition Monitoring Firm Finds a New Storage Paradigm

Data is collected from hundreds of sensors on equipment typically found on marine vessels. For example, as the data analytics leader for the US Navy surface fleet remote monitoring program, ESRG collects sensor data from about 115 US Navy assets. Information can be collected and performance evaluated on virtually any equipment that has a pump, valve, or sensor, including gas turbine engines, air conditioning plants, or water distillation systems.

The search for scalable, affordable storage to support development and business continuity

ESRG IT Manager John Schleigh explains that, as ESRG’s monitoring capabilities grew, so too did their databases. The company began to experience problems managing its growing data sets. Initially, they had been reading in a modest set of customer assets, but soon had to read a greater number of assets more frequently, and the infrastructure they had in place was not adequate to keep up with the exploding rate of growth.

“We had no way of knowing what we were about to receive,” said Schleigh. “We were hitting about 5 to10 gigabytes of growth a day. For many companies, that doesn’t sound like much, but back then we couldn’t manage the growth easily. We went from a 20-gigabyte Oracle database to topping out at over a terabyte within two to three months. We were running out of storage and had to find a better solution.”

Aside from its need to use the data for its core analytics, ESRG’s developers needed

copies of the data to use during software performance upgrades. With their existing system, copying the data took days, and they did not have sufficient storage capacity to create all of the copies required. At the same time, ESRG’s SaaS efforts began to grow quickly, which only compounded their existing storage problems. A final concern was guaranteeing recovery of information if there was a hardware failure.

To alleviate their short-term storage deficit, ESRG repurposed an aging Dell Precision desktop PC to run NexentaStor CE (community edition), a NAS/SAN software platform that runs on any industry-standard hardware. This worked well and relieved much of the pressure, also enabling greater access to data by the development team. They were able to replicate data with snapshots and replication volumes without the overhead normally involved in copying a huge amount of data.

These improvements showed ESRG the benefits of a more modern storage

As the number of assets monitored grew, so did ESRG’s need for a scalable storage solution.

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Expanding Maritime Remote Condition Monitoring Firm Finds a New Storage Paradigm

solution that would address their current and future storage needs.

ESRG then worked with a NetApp vendor, explaining that they were in the beginning stage of virtualizing their environment and needed more storage. The vendor sold them a Fabric-Attached Storage (FAS) 2020, which was initially more than adequate for their needs. However, according to Schleigh, “We installed it December 1st, and by January 1st it was saturated and we had run out of IOPS.” It quickly became clear that a more scalable and affordable solution was needed.

ESRG found that the cost to add a disk shelf was more than they spent for the original NetApp solution. Remembering their recent positive experience with NexentaStor, Schleigh sought out Steve Scherer, a storage solutions expert, to begin discussions on a cost-effective data storage solution that would allow scalability for the fast-growing firm.

Focusing on feature sets that would give ESRG the most bang for their buck, Scherer reviewed ESRG’s requirements and budget and presented a range of suitable options.

ESRG’s initial deployment used a “warm stand-by” configuration, in which two dual-CPU nodes were cabled into a shared disk array. One of the nodes was powered on and running an instance of NexentaStor. The other node was powered off, but had a pre-loaded instance of NexentaStor that could be powered on in the event of a node failure, limiting downtime. The disk array featured 6 mirrored pairs of 2TB Seagate

Constellation ES SAS drives, providing twice the capacity and higher throughput than the legacy appliance. The industry-standard hardware was easily scaled as budget and demand required. For instance, as storage volumes grew, the need to increase the system cache grew, so memory was easily doubled from 48GB to 96GB per node.

According to Scherer, ESRG required hybrid storage pools and the ability to queue up write operations to avoid bottlenecks. ESRG runs a high-performance Oracle database that requires very high write IOPS, with low latency. Scherer deployed high-performance, low-latency Seagate Pulsar.2 SAS SSDs for write cache. When a synchronous write request is received, that write is

zStax StorCore scales easily to meet growth requirements.

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Expanding Maritime Remote Condition Monitoring Firm Finds a New Storage Paradigm

committed to the Seagate SSDs and later flushed to the slower nearline SAS spinning disks that comprise the capacity of the storage. “High volumes of small-block write I/O can bring many storage systems to their knees, so we use ultra-fast and ultra-reliable Pulsar SSDs to handle that write workload,” says Scherer. He adds, “Seagate SSDs can also be leveraged for read cache, holding the most frequently accessed portions of the database on solid state media for extremely fast read access times.”

With this solution, ESRG can also copy its data instantly through the use of snapshots, which can be replicated to other nodes onsite and offsite. As customers are paying closer attention to business continuity and information practices and policies, this feature has become a huge advantage. Unlike legacy storage systems, zStax storage appliances provide snapshots at no additional cost, so if there were a failure at one site, data and applications can be brought up at another.

Development efforts are also facilitated by creating clones of snapshots to instantaneously provide developers with a copy of the data. Maintaining customer applications and standing up new instances is now a process that only takes them minutes to accomplish. Schleigh explains that the storage device provided by Silicon Mechanics allows ESRG incredible flexibility and reliability through coupling a wealth of features delivered by ZFS and NexentaStor with well-designed, cost-effective hardware. “zStax has the flexibility and portability to

support our development life cycle,” says Schleigh. “Silicon Mechanics has provided expert service and support for our growing SaaS business, and we know we can continue to grow with zStax.”

About Silicon Mechanics

Silicon Mechanics, Inc. is an industry-leading provider of rackmount server, storage, and high-performance computing solutions. Deploying the latest innovations in hardware and software technology, we work in collaboration with our customers to design and build the most efficient, cost-effective technology solution for their needs. Our guiding principle, “Expert included,” is our promise that reflects our passion for complete customer satisfaction, from server and component selection to superior installation and ongoing technical support. Silicon Mechanics has been recognized as one of the fastest growing companies in the Greater Seattle Technology Corridor.

About ESRG

Established in 2000, ESRG provides leading-edge data analysis and remote monitoring technology. ESRG supports the remote condition monitoring and analytics for maritime assets in the commercial maritime, offshore oil & gas and naval defense sectors. ESRG’s OstiaEdge platform enables owners, managers and operators to use the real-time data generated by onboard equipment to make better maintenance and operations decisions, both onboard and onshore.

Case Study made possible by:

SERVERS • STORAGE • HPC