Overview

pWith 2017 revenue of over 52 billion euros, Telefónica is one of the leading telecommunications providers in the world. Products span a wide variety of business solutions, including networking, mobility, productivity and collaboration, security, Internet of Things (IoT), big data, and cloud services. One of its business units, Telefónica Business Solutions, is dedicated to managing at a global level business segments for enterprises, multinational corporations, wholesale (fixed-line and mobile telephone carriers, ISPs and content providers) and roaming./p

Supernova Award Category

Tech Optimization and Modernization

The Problem

pTelefónica* is one of the largest telecommunications companies in the world. Based in Madrid, Spain, the company operates in 16 countries and serves more than 336 million customers. The desire for increased simplicity, efficiency and agility, combined with hybrid deployments and infrastructure refresh cycles, is driving cloud service providers (CSPs) like Telefónica toward hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI). Telefónica worked with Intel, VMware* and the server original equipment manufacturer (OEM) to design and conduct a proof of concept that explored how HCI could solve two important business problems: lower data center costs and improve data center manageability—without compromising the performance of Telefónica’s Virtual Data Center (VDC) service around the globe./p

The Solution

pThe answer to solving the latency problem lay in using a new technology for the vSAN caching tier—Intel® Optane™ DC SSDs—enabling Telefónica’s vSAN-based infrastructure to meet Telefónica’s most demanding storage SLAs. Intel Optane DC SSDs provide consistent latency, quality of service, and low latency in the demanding mixed read/write workloads seen in a storage caching layer, delivering data rapidly to the CPU and applications. An optimized HCI solution based on the latest VMware and Intel® technologies was just what Telefónica—and its customers—needed./p

The results

pHaving chosen vSAN as the foundation of their evolution towards a homogenous VDC service platform, powered by Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors, Telefónica collaborated with VMware, Intel, and the server OEM to define a vSAN configuration and test plan. Tests showed that the platform could not meet Telefónica’s top-tier storage SLA (Platinum). This meant Telefónica would have to continue to use traditional storage equipment for Platinum storage— undermining the operational efficiencies they had hoped to gain from vSAN. After further consultation with Intel and VMware, Telefónica decided to evaluate Intel Optane DC SSDs for the vSAN cache, to see if that approach could enable them to meet all their critical performance metrics such as high throughput and low latency./p

Metrics

pTelefonica exceeded their most stringent SLA's. /p pAs Telefónica expanded the VDC service over the years, it deployed new VDC nodes in various countries. Concentrating on leveraging local procurement agreements and the expertise of local operation teams resulted in different VDC nodes using a variety of servers and other hardware from different suppliers. As the nodes grew, this heterogeneous data center environment became hard to manage, and governance was increasingly difficult. Operations teams were large because there were so many different configurations and management tools in use across the VDC nodes in Spain, Brazil, the United States, Colombia, Mexico, Chile, Peru and Argentina. The end result was ever-increasing costs./p pSeeking a better operating model, Telefónica decided to explore HCI—scale-out, software-integrated infrastructure that applies a modular approach to compute, network and storage on standard hardware, using distributed, horizontal building blocks under unified management. HCI simplifies operational tasks by eliminating complex SANs and consolidating storage and compute on a single node. Throughout the cloud services industry, HCI is quickly replacing SAN—the global HCI market size is expected togrow from USD 4.1 billion in 2018 to USD 17.1 billion by 2023, at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 32.9 percent./p p /p

The Technology

pIntel Optane Technology is a new storage and media technology. A new media technology has not been released in over 25 years. Telefoncia implemented this new technology and as a result was able to exceed their data center performance and meet stringent SLA's./p

Disruptive Factor

pPrior to having Intel Optane Technology, Telefonica could not have met their most strict SLA's. With Intel Optane DC SSDs as the cache device, Telefónica’s customers can expect consistent, first-class I/O performance. Once the solution is deployed in Telefónica VDC nodes, end users can take advantage of the platform’s fast, efficient workload execution. Based on the compelling case for HCI using Intel Optane DC SSDs, Telefónica anticipates deploying vSAN across their VDC nodes, with the following expected benefits: A consolidated modern infrastructure, a homogenous platform and excellent operational efficiency./p

Shining Moment

p"Finally, we can get a hyperconverged system that can match or exceed the performance of our tradiotnal top-tier storage," said (Jose Maria Cuellar). WIthout the advent of Optane Technolgoy Telefoncia would not have been to rearchitect in the most efficent way possible./p p /p