The United Services Automobile Association (USAA) is a Texas-based Fortune 500 diversified financial services group of companies. They currently serve more than 10 million members, meaning data storage is a complex priority. Richard Webster, USAA’s IT manager, explains how they rise to the challenge.
Tell us a bit about your current storage setup.
We leverage a great deal of EMC technology to support our storage needs throughout the datacentre. We heavily rely on products like SRD F/A to maintain replication, VMAX as a primary store for data, VNX for specifically tailored requirements, Isilon for scale-out NAS needs and XtremIO on low-latent highly dedupable and compressed workloads.
How has that setup evolved over the years?
The transformation of VMAX turned storage into the crown jewel of the datacentre. The ability to use multi-tiering of disks allowed us to take advantage of FAST VP which automated movement of data to the proper tier based on required performance. The ability to place data in the place at the right time without human intervention took us from managing the data to simply managing the policy. And we can take advantage of thick to thin provisioning which allowed us to over subscribe storage providing better utilisation and a savings in power and footprint in the data center.
VMAX has absolutely been a game changer for us; we believe hyper-consolidation with VMAX 3 will revolutionize our datacenter journey.
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What kind of challenges have you had developing your set-up?
There are always challenges. Typically, the biggest challenge comes from not having well defined requirements. You get a request from an application owner saying ‘I need X’. You give them X and it’s not enough or it doesn’t perform because it’s not based on any science. Asking questions like, ‘what are the IOPs you’re going to push? or’ what kind of latency can you tolerate?’ Those types of answers aren’t typically readily available, which makes it challenging.
How do you deal with that?
How we dealt with it before and how we deal with it now are very different. We go back to the journey regarding VMAX in terms of ‘FAST’. A lot of what we do is say ‘okay, we’re going to put X amount of SSD, and X amount of fibre channel disks, to meet the various performance needs of multiple applications. With FAST VP we let the policies move the data to the proper place and proper time. Going forward there’s the potential with VPLEX and XtremIO to utilise those two products to remediate bully workloads. If there’s an unpredictable workload that our traditional arrays can’t handle the thought process is we can move that workload to XtremIO via VPLEX, resolve the issue on the backend and move the workload back to the original location. So what we did before and what we’re going to do in the future are quite different.
What have been your biggest concerns when setting up your storage infrastructure?
As far as infrastructure is concerned, security is a big thing. When it comes to infrastructure, it’s the cost in the data centre that is significant. Being a Fortune 500 company, we require a good amount of resources to properly support a company such as ours. We want to make certain every effort is made to protect our members and, at the same time, manage costs to the best of our ability.
How do you think companies will adjust their approach to data storage in the coming years?
Today, fundamentally, tiered storage is still the most attractive approach for storing data but it also depends on the requirements of the application. As the costs of SSDs continue to drop, I can imagine conversations are becoming more about cost per IOP versus the cost per Gigabyte. At the end of the day, it’s really about returning the best investment to your members and organisation.
