
Challenges
- Batch imports into the SQL database
were taking up to 27 hours to complete
- Account managers were not
able to access the most current
data immediately
- Improvements to network and storage
still were not enough to overcome
sluggish SQL performance
V-locity® Benefits
- 50% or greater application
performance improvement—with
no additional hardware
- Latency and throughput
dramatically improved
- True “Set It and Forget It ” management
- Compatible with all SAN/NAS systems
- Easily deploy to the largest virtual,
physical or cloud environments in
just five clicks
- Before-and-after performance reporting
to validate performance gains
- Enterprise-wide visibility into I/O
performance, from server to storage
"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."
RALPH ORTIZ
IT MANAGER
ASL MARKETING
Environment
- VMware vSphere 5.1
- 42 Windows servers running SQL Server
- EMC VNXe SAN with 15K and 10K SAS
- 10GbE network
V-locity Features
- IntelliWrite® I/O optimization
technology automatically prevents split
I/Os from being generated when a file is
typically broken into pieces before write.
- IntelliMemory® intelligent caching
technology caches active data from read
requests using available server memory.
- Benefit Analyzer embedded
benchmark provides before/after
performance comparisons, enabling IT to
measure workloads and performance in a
real-world environment.
Condusiv Technologies
7590 N. Glenoaks Blvd., Burbank, CA 91504
800-829-6468
www.condusiv.com
Condusiv Technologies Europe
Goldvale House, 27-41 Church Street West,
Woking, Surrey, GU21 6DH
+44 (0) 1483.377.200
www.condusiv.co.uk
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.