Sangfor HCI and aStor Success Story of an Asian Disciplinary Force
Customer Background
The customer is a leading disciplinary force in Asia with a history spanning over 175 years. They are looking to upgrade their IT infrastructure for both their external-facing and internal services.
Customer Requirements
- The customer requires a platform for hosting external-facing applications. The platform must be able to store data for new technologies they plan to use, such as blockchain and cloud-native applications.
- They also need a platform to support their internal systems like file sharing and office automation (OA). The platform must be able to back up datasets across both Linux and Windows platforms.
Customer Pain Points
- The specific types of data to be stored are not yet decided because the applications are still under development. Nonetheless, the infrastructure must be prepared in advance to meet planning and implementation timelines.
- The customer cannot accurately predict how much data they will generate or how quickly the data will grow due to the adoption of emerging technologies. The infrastructure needs to be designed to cope with data storage needs for the next 3-5 years. Additionally, the customer believes that having only two copies of the data for backup is not sufficient.
- The customer has strict security requirements that include isolating the demilitarized zone (DMZ) hosting external-facing applications and their internal network.
Sangfor Solution
The customer deployed Sangfor HCI (Hyperconverged Infrastructure) and Sangfor aStor to meet their application hosting and data storage requirements.
Sangfor HCI is a software-defined data center (SDDC) solution that integrates compute, storage, networking, and security into a unified software stack. Sangfor HCI caters to a wide range of digital transformation use cases, including enterprise application hosting, hybrid cloud, virtual desktop infrastructure, distributed storage, and disaster recovery.
Sangfor aStor is a software-defined storage (SDS) solution that adopts a distributed architecture supporting block, file, and object storage services in one platform. It is designed to meet diverse enterprise storage needs with a focus on high performance, easy scalability, and robust reliability.
- The customer deployed two HCI clusters—one dedicated to the DMZ for external-facing blockchain applications, and another for internal services like office applications.
- A 5-node aStor cluster was deployed to provide iSCSI (Internet Small Computer Systems Interface) as secondary storage for the HCI platform and object storage for blockchain applications.
- The solution uses aStor's Network File System (NFS) for backup storage within the HCI platform.
- aStor also supports CIFS/SMB (Common Internet File System/Server Message Block) for Windows File Storage, facilitating file access and sharing across the network.