Leading Online Retailer Moves to the Cloud with Voltaire 10GbE
A leading online retailer with more than 90 million customers globally needed to be able to run business intelligence applications rapidly across enormous data sets. Using the open source software framework Hadoop combined with Voltaire scale-out 10GbE switches, it was able to build a cloud infrastructure that is highly scalable and delivers both high bandwidth and low power consumption.
Customer Challenge
With more than 90 million customers globally, a leading online retailer had an enormous amount of data that needed to be managed and analyzed. As its customer base grew, the retailer required a better system for analyzing all of this data in order to provide better services to its customers—and in turn drive new revenue.
The retailer decided to implement a cloud infrastructure within its data center based on a flat, highly scalable 10GbE network. A critical element of the infrastructure is Hadoop—an open source software framework that supports data-intensive distributed applications. Hadoop provides a distributed file system that enables high throughput access to application data and automates parallel execution of analysis code across large clusters. In order to optimize Hadoop within its infrastructure and run business intelligence applications more rapidly, the retailer needed a data center networking solution that provides both extreme scalability and high bandwidth.
The Voltaire Solution
To accomplish this, the retailer turned to Voltaire’s scale-out 10GbE solutions. Two Voltaire® Vantage™ 8500 low latency 10 GbE Layer 2 core switches are connected to L2/L3 top-of-rack switches to provide CEE capabilities such as lossless traffic in a high density form factor. By implementing a flat, high bandwidth Layer 2 network, the retailer is able to achieve the best cost-performance and extreme scalability for its Hadoop-based applications.
The Voltaire Vantage 8500 features 288 non-blocking 10GbE ports in a 15U high chassis, making it the world’s largest non-blocking Ethernet data center switch. The Vantage 8500 is based on converged enhanced Ethernet (CEE) technology to provide new network capabilities such as a lossless switching fabric, multi-pathing, virtualization, fabric-wide congestion management and QoS. The Vantage 8500 features less than 1 microsecond latency, low 10 watts per port power consumption and low per port costs, delivering unmatched scalability.
Why Voltaire?
In order to deploy large scale-out or cloud data center architectures such as this one, new networking solutions are required that can deliver performance and efficiency at low costs and with low power consumption. With Voltaire scale-out 10GbE solutions, users benefit from a far more scalable, lower latency, and virtualized fabric with lower overall fabric costs and power consumption, greater efficiencies, and simplified management than traditional 10 GbE fabrics.
At the center of Voltaire’s scale-out 10GbE solution is the Voltaire Vantage 8500, which is based on CEE standards and enables a converged, high-density, low latency, low power, lossless and virtualized data center fabric. These switches can be clustered to form large, linearly scaling Layer 2 fabrics with a simplified “flat” data center architecture that delivers high throughput and reliable performance.
The Results
The installation set a record at the retailer for the shortest implementation cycle. The arrival of the first hardware to the point of handoff to the internal users was a mere 10 days, as compared to the retailer’s more typical 80 day implementation timeline.
The retailer has achieved record-breaking performance for Hadoop, enabling it to run its business intelligence applications faster than ever before. With Voltaire, it can continue to scale out the environment to thousands of servers as its data management and analysis needs grow.