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Highlights
SupplyScape, a privately held VC-backed firm founded in 2004, provides software solutions to protect patient safety and ensure provenance in global pharmaceutical supply chains. The company transitioned its business model from an on-premise to a software as a service (SaaS) approach and realized that its direct attached storage infrastructure was an inhibitor to growth. After evaluating various alternatives in the marketplace, SupplyScape successfully deployed 3PAR virtualization and thin provisioning which has dramatically simplified capacity provisioning and allowed the company to reign in data storage and database costs while minimizing disruption. Notably, the new storage infrastructure has helped the company to realign its business model.
This case study highlights the key business challenges SupplyScape faced and how it applied thin provisioning technology to build a business capability to support customer growth more cost effectively.
Business Background
SupplyScape is a fast-growing Massachusetts-based company that addresses patient safety and drug provenance by creating software solutions which provide a serialized product authentication service to global pharmaceutical supply chains. The company uses electronic pedigrees to verify authenticity of products at each step in the supply chain. SupplyScape's approach allows manufacturers to look back through that chain to thwart counterfeiting and address other chain of custody challenges. The company had a niche SaaS offering which began growing rapidly and ultimately became SupplyScapes primary line of business.
Original Storage Snapshot
SupplyScape has a relatively small storage environment (less than 20TB). Prior to 2007, SupplyScape's SaaS offering utilized direct attached storage. To service customers, SupplyScape creates so-called "capitalization units" which are blocks of server, storage, database and other infrastructure assets allocated to support a group of customer functional requirements. This allows SupplyScape to have a predictable cost structure for each capitalization unit and ensure costs are in line with revenue. As new customers and products are added or existing customers acquire new modules, these chunks of resources are added accordingly.
Storage Pain Points
It became clear to management that this approach was proving too disruptive, cumbersome and expensive. The existing process made it difficult to give applications access to all the data. Because SupplyScape capitalization units are interdependent, the company needed an economic way to interconnect units and share data and resources. As part of a general cost reduction effort, IT management began looking at a new infrastructure architecture that would allow additional capacity to be integrated more easily.
Specifically, SupplyScape was trying to address three major issues, including:
- Disruption - adding and removing storage and DAS trays was creating downtime and taking precious maintenance window slots. This was manageable for a few units, but looking at the companies growth projections it was clear the model would not scale;
- Rebalancing - each unit of capacity added required moving data and re-balancing capacity across the spindle farm, which required effort and added risk to growing capacity;
- Database costs - were too high as license charges applied to each unit of capacity added and utilization of resources was poor.
Unique in Wikibon's experience with startups, these architectural inhibitors to growth were realized early and fixed before becoming a serious issue.
Solution Strategy
SupplyScape needed a method to add storage non-disruptively, which could support the company's aggressive growth plan. After evaluating one other supplier, SupplyScape settled on the acquisition of two 3PAR InServ® Storage Servers with 3PAR Virtual Copy, 3PAR Dynamic Optimization, and 3PAR Thin Provisioning. SupplyScape also purchased 3PAR Remote Copy for replication between its primary Boston datacenter and a recovery datacenter in Denver. The company's recovery point objective (RPO) is one hour and its recovery time objective (RTO) is four hours and 3PAR's remote copy solution was adequate-- this capability is tight but not an automatic failover.
As well, SupplyScape supports its developers in fixing bugs using 3PAR's Virtual Copy capability. SupplyScape developers have two types of bugs to fix: 1) bugs that come from coding errors and 2) bugs that are data related. In the latter, developers need to test algorithms against different data elements in the specific order data gets created, to find the rouge data which contains the bug. Because SupplyScape needs to keep data for seven years, the volume of information and amount of storage needed to fix bugs can grow very rapidly. By using 3PAR's Virtual Copy, SupplyScape developers can virtually snap a copy of data and store just the pointers to changed data, thereby dramatically limiting the amount of physical storage required to support development.
According to John Kordash, Director of Operations and Architecture at SupplyScape, the "getting in the door costs" with 3PAR were reasonable and 3PAR's thin provisioning approach solved the disruption problems SupplyScape faced with DAS. SupplyScape architected a system where it could allocate, for example, a 2TB table space to a host and add additional directories as required, without having to provision a full 2TB of physical capacity.
SupplyScape currently provisions 6TB raw and has over-provisioned 12-14TB's. It plans to provision another 12TB over the next year, keeping the same physical size. SupplyScape is also investigating 3PAR's nearline solution, keeping 'cool' data on the array using 3PAR's high capacity SATA devices for less frequently accessed information. SupplyScape estimates that 40% of its storage requirements are for so-called 'cool' data and the company believes by using SATA it can continue to lower costs.
The company's practice is to over-provision by a factor of 2-3X and trigger the addition of physical capacity at 85% usage.
Benefits
As supplyScape's customer base expanded ten-fold, the company needed a way to maintain high availability, minimize disruption and efficiently deploy capitalization units for its SaaS modules. SupplyScape reports seeing several benefits that resulted from the change in storage infrastructure, including:
- More cost-effective deployment methodology for hardware and software infrastructure
- Faster time to market deploying changes
- Less disruption and elimination of planned downtime
- Easing of maintenance window pressures
- Simplified and more cost-effective debugging
- Fifty percent improvement in capacity utilization relative to DAS
- Avoided more Oracle licenses which already amount to almost 50% of the infrastucture costs by being able to distribute workloads more evenly and better utilize exisiting assets
Conclusions
Dynamic optimization and the use of thin provisioning for on demand storage deployment has allowed SupplyScape to cost effectively scale and deliver an innovative pay-as-you-go service model for customers. This has given the company a first mover advantage in a fast growing marketplace, helping pharmaceutical customers ensure provenance in the supply chain and raise the bar for counterfeiters. It has provided SupplyScape key competitive advantages relative to traditional models and the company is clearly a pioneer. It will likely see further cost reductions as it implements nearline storage to support the maintenance of data elements for up to seven years.
On balance, 3PAR's thin provisioning and SupplyScape's SaaS business model are a perfect fit. Because of SupplyScape's business profile, its RTO and RPO are not mission critical (e.g. as is a bank's) and 3PAR's remote replication technology is adequate for SupplyScape's needs.
Going forward, SupplyScape appears to have architected a simple solution that will scale and support the company's rapid growth.
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