Black Friday is one of the most anticipated dates for Brazilian consumers.

In 2016, online commerce sold R$ 1.9 billion on the promotion day, according to E-bit, a consultancy specialized in the sector. As expected, the event was also very important for Via Varejo Online, the e-commerce business unit of Grupo Pão de Açúcar (GPA), responsible for the websites Extra.com.br, Pontofrio.com, Casas-bahia.com.br, as well as the infrastructure of extradelivery.com.br and paodeacucar.com.br, among other e-commerce sites of clients and partners.

The numbers for Black Friday are significant for the company: simultaneous connections and requests per second increase by 400% compared to a normal day. But the good performance on the date is highly dependent on the technology infrastructure. The initial idea of the Via Varejo Online IT team to support the load volume on the promotion day, improve scalability, and reduce response latency was to move some applications, which had been prepared to be stored and executed in containers (small virtual structures that house the systems), to the public cloud.
Benefits of Cisco hyperconvergence at Via Varejo Online

Performance

Storage capacity and physical space in the data center

Easy expansion

Better performance for dealing with duplicate data in virtual machines

"The applications were migrated to containers and simultaneously to the public cloud," recalls Alexandre Nascimento, IT architect and data center infrastructure administrator of the company. At the end of this migration, several occurrences (some related to IT and others to operational issues) caused the roll-back of the migration, that is, the applications returned to the company's data center, but running in a container structure.

In this model, virtual machines that ran only one application suddenly started to handle around 20 applications, with high processing volume and data mass generation. In Nascimento's words, "this caused application performance degradation, freezing systems and backup processes."

As Black Friday approached, the scenario was still challenging. It was then that the company's IT team opted for the Cisco HyperFlex hyper-converged platform. The solution, which had been presented to Via Varejo Online by the integrator Vortex, unites and integrates network, processing, and storage elements in a single system.

On the eve of the promotion day, the migration to the Cisco HyperFlex hyper-converged platform was carried out, helping the company overcome two major challenges: the short implementation time and the performance test on the main date for e-commerce.
"HyperFlex not only ensured a Black Friday without incidents but also supported the intense read and write peaks of virtual machines," emphasizes Nascimento. "With just three nodes, I did not expect HyperFlex to do everything it did," he reinforces.

Besides ensuring the performance of virtual machines, Cisco HyperFlex increased processing capacity and freed up physical space in the Via Varejo Online data center. Another detected benefit was the easy expansion of the solution. In fact, the IT architect highlights that the solution can meet areas with many duplicated data, "a differential for our company," he completes.

Easy and simple project

According to Nascimento, the HyperFlex implementation was simple and took just a few hours (a period that includes the entire cabling phase and preparing the environment to receive the technology). "After the rack was installed, we just needed to plug the equipment into the rack," recalls the architect. "This installation simplicity is another excellent characteristic of hyper-convergence," he reinforces.
Regarding the growth of hyper-convergence, Nascimento believes it should be simple, just generating new nodes and plugging the cabling. "The configuration is automated by a virtual machine and this process takes around 90 minutes as a whole," he illustrates.
According to him, the technology remains on the radar for new projects that demand agility, high performance, scalability, and simplicity. "Wherever there are many data and performance is needed, we will certainly consider Cisco hyper-convergence," he concludes.