ASL CUTS HOURS FROM SQL BATCH JOBS
with V-locity Acceleration Software

When ASL marketing would regularly import 150 million updated records into its SQL database, the job would take 27 hours to complete, resulting in lost time and money since account managers were not able to access the most current data immediately.

The Customer

As the leading source for direct marketing youth data, ASL Marketing connects your brand to consumers with extensive and unparalleled industry expertise in data content, aggregation and analytics of the youth, young adult and student demographics.

The Challenge

ASL Marketing’s business is database marketing with millions of records under management that advertising agencies and vendors alike put to use. This database is constantly being appended to and updated to reflect the most current behavioral and demographic data, which is an absolute must for their clients who need immediate access to the most current data at all times.

Records were ballooning to the point that the monthly import to the master database exceeded 150 million records and took 27 hours to run the batch job across their SQL servers. Other databases like their college record database needed to be updated once a week and would take 17 hours to complete. As a result, access to the most current data was being delayed by a full day and sometimes two.

With data under management exploding, the IT staff was managing to a flat budget and needed to find ways to improve performance without buying expensive new hardware.

"Typically, IT professionals respond to application performance issues by reactively buying more hardware. Without the luxury of a padded budget, we needed to find a way to improve performance on the hardware infrastructure we already have," said Ralph Ortiz, IT Manager, ASL Marketing.

The Solution

Ralph heard about V-locity® I/O reduction and caching software and reached out to the Condusiv sales team to help him with an evaluation to see how V-locity would perform in his real-world environment of SQL servers.

"I was very doubtful that V-locity could improve my I/O performance through a software-only solution. But with nothing to lose, we evaluated V-locity on our SQL servers and were amazed to see that, literally overnight, we doubled performance and cut our SQL batch job times in half," said Ortiz.

Installed on Windows VMs at the operating system layer, V-locity I/O reduction and caching software nondisruptively optimizes I/O at the source—reducing the I/O requirement for all files which accelerates both reads and writes. By preventing a surplus of I/O from getting funneled through servers, network, and storage, the entire infrastructure derives benefit because only productive I/O is generated by the VM.

With IntelliWrite® technology, V-locity sequentializes otherwise random I/O created by the “I/O blender effect” of multiple VMs funneling I/O streams down to the hypervisor. By reorganizing this random pattern to behave sequentially as a single, contiguous I/O, less I/O is required for any given file. Since more data is now processed with each I/O operation, organizations achieve greater throughput and improved response times. Subsequent reads also benefit, since only minimum I/O is required to fulfill the data request.

With IntelliMemory,® V-locity caches active data in available server memory to further reduce I/O demand on storage devices.

The Result

After deploying V-locity, SQL batch jobs that used to take 27 hours to complete now take 12–14 hours to complete. The weekly college database import that used to take 17 hours to complete is now down to 7 hours.

“With V-locity, our SQL batch imports can run during the night so data is ready for production in the morning. Before V-locity, batch jobs would take so long, we would lose a full day of production and sometimes two,” said Ortiz.

According to Ortiz, the most important value V-locity provided is that they didn’t have to buy new, expensive hardware to double their SQL performance.

“We moved to 10GbE to improve throughput but still had limitations. V-locity saved us from having to make a heavy investment in SSDs or do a complete rip and replace of our entire hardware infrastructure. To this day, I still can’t believe software is doing this,” said Ortiz.