In 1998, Toronto Internet Exchange (TorIX), the first non-profit internet exchange in Toronto, was created to directly connect the internet traffic of Canadian businesses by using local network infrastructure. A group of experts collaborated to establish TorIX with the intention of overcoming the cost and latency issues of having Canadian traffic flow through the United States. Today, TorIX has over 250 organisations connected with access to direct routes from many diverse peering partners.

As a non-profit organisation, TorIX focuses on investing funds into infrastructure, so that its technology can stay up to date to remain at the forefront of the Internet Exchange Point (IXP) industry. Previously, TorIX was using a VMware installation with no replication, however it wanted to avoid large, hardware-dependent installations associated with vSAN and to find a solution better fitted for its long-term needs.

TorIX began the process of evaluating market options for an infrastructure solution to power its IT operations that was high-performing, simple and easy to manage. More specifically, TorIX was searching for a solution that it could trust with managing all of its critical external services for customers, including its online portal systems, telemetry data, web and mail applications. At the top of TorIX’s priority list was a hyperconverged solution that was easy for its IT team to manage, which is why the company turned to SvSAN.

EASY TO MANAGE & UPGRADE
To power its non-profit internet exchange, TorIX needed a hyperconverged solution between its two data centres with high performance and availability. After evaluating multiple options, TorIX found that StorMagic SvSAN best suited its needs because it was simple for its IT team to manage and easy to upgrade, while still remaining cost effective and modern.

Furthermore, SvSAN's stretch/metro cluster capability enabled TorIX to site its two SvSAN nodes 3 kilometres apart with no impact on performance thanks to SvSAN's low bandwidth requirements.

MAXIMUM UPTIME
TorIX now has a two-node cluster consisting of Cisco servers and VMware vSphere as the hypervisor. With SvSAN, TorIX can easily manage its IT infrastructure with 100 percent redundancy and high availability. SvSAN powers all of TorIX's critical external services for customers, such as web and mail applications, online portal systems and telemetry data.

TorIX has reported maximum uptime in operations, delivering powerful direct internet routes to peering partners without interruptions. In addition, throughout the pre- and post-implementation process, TorIX found StorMagic's world-class, 24/7 customer support highly responsive and helpful with technical expertise. TorIX found that SvSAN is reliable and simple to manage for its day-to-day operations. High data availability is critical to TorIX and their loyal customers.

"TorIX is driven to directly connect Canadian business' internet traffic through the local network infrastructure, while maintaining strong network performance and low latency," commented Jon Nistor, Board Director, TorIX. "To deliver this to customers, we prioritise investing in modern technology for our IT infrastructure, so that we can remain at the forefront of the industry. This is why we selected StorMagic SvSAN, so that TorIX can now power operations with a modern system that is easy to manage, flexible and high-performing.

"We have been 100% satisfied with StorMagic, which we trust to power all of our critical external services for our customers and have the peace of mind that our systems will never fail."

More info: www.stormagic.com