onOffice – Property Management as a Service
onOffice is one of Germany’s leading providers of property management solutions. Its SaaS solution onOffice Enterprise delivers everything today’s property and real estate managers need to productively fulfill their clients’ business needs. The product benefits from the expertise and experience of the company’s more than 100 employees. As a result, onOffice solutions are tailor-made for anything real estate-related – and more; they’re also used by prefab house manufacturers and banks. In addition to property management tools, onOffice also provides a content management system that’s tailored to the marketing needs of today’s real estate business. The CMS allows real estate agents to fine-tune the presentation of their offerings down to the last detail.
Advantages
High-performance storage for the small file workload
Fully automated for 24/7 operations without maintenance downtime
Automatic tiering: Quobyte moves “cold” data automatically and transparently to HDDs
Performance scales linearly with added resources
From Patchwork to Complete End-to-End Solution
onOffice used shared storage with NFS as the access point, but problems quickly arose. The team had to consult the storage administrators whenever there was an issue; significant waiting times were the norm and often the issue could only be tackled on a more global level instead of developing a custom solution to the problem at hand. Downtimes were unavoidable which angered onOffice’s customers. And the system had bottlenecks, too, and couldn’t keep up with the constant data influx. Scaling the system by adding the much needed additional capacity was no easy feat. What’s more, a further bottleneck in the form of an overloaded network connection brought NFS to a halt several times.
When researching and testing Quobyte, the onOffice team immediately found all their requirements satisfied and then some. Quobyte delivered a true end-to-end solution and did away with performance limits, scalability troubles, and downtimes.
High Performance without Capacity Limits
Quobyte’s Data Center File System was designed with high scalability in mind. To extend capacity and scale performance (linearly) simply add additional storage resources. Quobyte detects and integrates the new devices automatically. Rebalancing is optional and can either be started manually or automated based on your schedule (e.g. be run every night or only on weekends).
The Quobyte-based horizontal storage infrastructure eliminates all of onOffice’s former issues. IOPS now scale linearly with added resources and cumbersome capacity planning is a thing of the past – no need for a bag of tricks to get the system to scale. Quobyte especially excels when it comes to dealing with onOffice’s vast amount of small files. This enables onOffice to easily scale and grow rapidly. “With Quobyte we were able to seamlessly increase our storage capacity by more than 30% by simply adding additional nodes to the system,” said Christian Küppers, storage admin at onOffice.
After an easy installation, you can extend capacity as needed, rely on excellent performance, and benefit from extreme robustness – with everything wrapped into a single system: that’s what storage has to be like today! Quobyte helps us take our business to the next level without further ado; we can just add resources without the planning overhead – a true competitive advantage!
Stefan Mantl
CEO, onOffice
Automatic Tiering Optimizes Storage Utilization
With Quobyte, onOffice can now use SSDs for speed and cost-efficient HDDs for capacity within the same system. They thus benefit from the best of both worlds. Quobyte’s tiered storage solution optimizes utilization of the heterogeneous hardware setup: files that haven’t been touched for some time will automatically and transparently be migrated from the “hot” and much used SSDs to the “cold storage” of hard disk drives. Users won’t even notice a difference, because the HDD data can still be accessed with a latency of less than 20ms. OnOffice estimates that the Quobyte system cost them only one-tenth as much as other vendors’ systems with similar performance, capacity, and tiering capability – significant savings indeed!
Simple Installation and Fast Support
Installing Quobyte was done quickly: The Filoo team that helped onOffice with the setup already had experience with the software and was able to put the system into production in no time. A minor hiccup – one device would not initialize – was immediately resolved by Quobyte’s support team. They even did one better: The Quobyte team identified an issue in the onOffice software, which, once corrected, further increased the overall storage performance.
Quobyte is an admin’s dream! A quick setup lands you with an easy-to-use and easy-to-manage storage infrastructure that is indestructible. Our performance limits evaporated into thin air and we can now scale out our storage at will.
Christian Küppers
Storage Administrator, onOffice
Reliable Storage and Automated Management
Other major reasons for choosing Quobyte software storage were its fault tolerance and reliability. Quobyte protects data end-to-end with checksums, thus guaranteeing the data’s integrity. The built-in monitoring allows for a great overview of the status of the storage system. The dashboard helps to drill down on the details to easily and quickly find any misbehaving hardware. Quobyte detects issues caused by faulty hardware and automatically removes defective devices from the storage system. The onOffice admins can then replace the hardware during planned maintenance; no more emergencies in the middle of the night or interruptions of their well-deserved day off.
Once the new hardware is in place, automatic repair tasks kick in and spare the administrator tedious manual, and repetitive actions. Saving this time shows significant results: onOffice can now easily run and expand its storage infrastructure while the admins save valuable time for other, more business-critical tasks.
