IT Environment The Canadian city of 30,000 inhabitants has two data centers with 24 terabytes (TB) of storage capacity per site architected in an active/active configuration with synchronous replication for continuous availability. Each location includes one IBM DS3524 storage array with an IBM SAN Volume Controller (SVC), a virtualization appliance that presents storage to VMware. The server environ- ment is based on three VMware vSphere clusters for production, voice and video. Ten VMware ESXi 5.5 hosts support 107 virtual machines (VMs) on the Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) B200 Blade Servers. The city’s data center is the backbone of its computer-run operations. Enterprise applications, such as Microsoft Exchange, Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server databases, support all administrative tasks, company email, tax records, public security, engineering, payroll, city-run sports programs and more. Performance issues Storage latency was a major challenge, with employees complaining that generating reports using SQL and Oracle data could take four to eight hours. During this time, users were unable to access database applications on their computers, and productivity suffered. The IT team was not able to resolve the support ticket cases that were being reported, and end users were frustrated. After evaluating Atlantis ILIO, the city’s IT team implemented the solution for a trial in their VDI environment, but put it on hold after there were no sufficient performance improvements. The team began evaluating other storage platforms to help with latency and performance problems, and found the solution it was looking for when it was introduced to the software-only Infinio Accelerator at VMworld 2015. A Canadian city government accelerates its Oracle and Microsoft SQL database applications with Infinio Faster database response times translate into reduced time to generate reports, smoother operations and more productive users INDUSTRY Local government BENEFITS • 70 to 80 percent I/O offloaded for database requests • Storage latency reduced from 9 ms to 2.3 ms • Time to generate reports reduced from half a day to fewer than two hours • 20 hours of database report processing saved per week • Vastly improved user experience, eliminated IT support complaints “Infinio relieves our system of latency and delays, allowing it to run more efficiently and smoothly. The solution was incredibly easy to deploy and configure, and working with the Infinio team was effortless.”
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IT Environment
The Canadian city of 30,000 inhabitants has two data centers with 24 terabytes (TB) of storage capacity per site architected in an active/active configuration with synchronous replication for continuous availability. Each location includes one IBM DS3524 storage array with an IBM SAN Volume Controller (SVC), a virtualization appliance that presents storage to VMware. The server environ-ment is based on three VMware vSphere clusters for production, voice and video. Ten VMware ESXi 5.5 hosts support 107 virtual machines (VMs) on the Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) B200 Blade Servers.
The city’s data center is the backbone of its computer-run operations. Enterprise applications, such as Microsoft Exchange, Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server databases, support all administrative tasks, company email, tax records, public security, engineering, payroll, city-run sports programs and more.
Performance issues
Storage latency was a major challenge, with employees complaining that generating reports using SQL and Oracle data could take four to eight hours. During this time, users were unable to access database applications on their computers, and productivity suffered. The IT team was not able to resolve the support ticket cases that were being reported, and end users were frustrated.
After evaluating Atlantis ILIO, the city’s IT team implemented the solution for a trial in their VDI environment, but put it on hold after there were no sufficient performance improvements. The team began evaluating other storage platforms to help with latency and performance problems, and found the solution it was looking for when it was introduced to the software-only Infinio Accelerator at VMworld 2015.
A Canadian city government accelerates its Oracle and Microsoft SQL database applications with InfinioFaster database response times translate into reduced time to generate reports, smoother operations and more productive users
INDUSTRYLocal government
BENEFITS
• 70 to 80 percent I/O offloaded for
database requests
• Storage latency reduced from
9 ms to 2.3 ms
• Time to generate reports
reduced from half a day to fewer
than two hours
• 20 hours of database report
processing saved per week
• Vastly improved user experience,
eliminated IT support complaints
“Infinio relieves our system of latency and delays, allowing it to run more efficiently and smoothly. The solution was incredibly easy to deploy and configure, and working with the Infinio team was effortless.”
The city’s IT team installed Infinio Accelerator in fewer than 30 minutes with no downtime, starting a 30-day trial in its production environment. Within a short time, 70 to 80 percent of database input/output (I/O) read requests were being offloaded by Infinio, reducing storage latency from 9 milliseconds (ms) to 2.3 ms and allowing to cut the time to generate reports.
“Infinio significantly improved the performance of our Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server databases. With 70 to 80 percent I/O offload and storage latency reduced by a factor of 4, our end-user experience was greatly improved,” said the city’s principal IT technician. “The time needed to run reports has diminished from five to two hours. We’re saving up to 20 hours of database report processing time per week, and our system is able to tackle other priority operations.”
Infinio Accelerator was deployed on the hosts that serve two IBM Fibre Channel storage area networks (SANs), one in each data center, and accelerated a production cluster with four datastores that included all SQL and Oracle database workloads. Now, users can generate reports faster and face fewer system lockouts while data is being accessed; some reports that previously required five hours to create are now processing in fewer than two hours. Since Oracle and SQL database applications now respond much quicker, the user experience has greatly improved and IT has seen a resulting decrease in support tickets.
“Infinio relieves our system of latency and delays, allowing it to run more efficiently and smoothly. The solution was incredibly easy to deploy and configure, and working with the Infinio team was effortless. We are now embarking on the second half of our strategy to accelerate our IT environment – evaluating hybrid storage systems that can incorporate Infinio Accelerator as their performance-caching layer.”
“Infinio significantly improved the performance of our Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server databases. With 70 to 80 percent I/O offload and storage latency reduced by a factor of 4, our end-user experience was greatly improved. We’re saving up to 20 hours of database report processing time per week, and our system is able to tackle other priority operations.”
“We are now embarking on the second half of our strategy to accelerate our IT environment – evaluating hybrid storage systems that can incorporate Infinio Accelerator as their performance caching layer.”
To learn more about Infinio Accelerator, contact us at 617. 374.6500, visit us at www.infinio.com, or follow us @infinio.
