Vail Systems delivers

real-time billing

The ChallengeVail Systems is one of the top communication hosting

companies in the world. It processes 4.1 million calls and

generates more than 18 million billing records in a day.

The success of Vail Systems and other communication

hosting companies hinges on service availability and the

best customer care. Vail's clients provide their customer

care based on Vail's hosting solutions. When a client

needs data on a billing issue, the quality of the client's

customer care depends on the response time of Vail's

system.

Vail's Microsoft SQL Server database performance was

challenged by a usage model that made it difficult to

maintain high performance with hard disk drives:

Each call into the Vail platform typically creates

multiple database writes (billing records and other

information). The writes are sequential, and they

blocked read access until they were completed. Billing

records writes add 3.5 GB to the database each day.

Client queries to the database cause random access

across the whole database, thus stretching beyond

the memory on the server and requiring significant

disk access.

Vail Systems mirrors its databases for redundancy.

While necessary for reliability and high availability,

this effectively blocked read operations as the

redundant writes occurred.

David Fruin, vice president of engineering, faced the

challenge of finding a way to eliminate the bottleneck of

the slow hard disk drives without having to do

significant development to change the architecture of

the billing system and the customer-care interface.

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The SolutionDavid considered a number of solutions, including re-

engineering the billing system on a No-SQL solution.

That would have required significant development work

and a change to how Vail's client's accessed their billing

system. Clients were already familiar with the SQL

interface and the capabilities an SQL Server provided.

"After a lot of research and discussions with other

technology professionals, I concluded that Virident

boards could increase the performance without any

development or change to the customer interface,"

said David.

By replace the hard disk drives on the SQL Server

database with Virident FlashMAX, David was able to

improve Vail's client query performance from seconds

to a premium customer care experience.

The Virident FlashMAX drives eliminated the queuing

created by write operations. Disk queue length shrunk

by more than a factor of ten - from 60 to 6 writes.

Database response time decreased on average by a

factor of ten, dropping from an average of 5 seconds to

as low as 500 milliseconds. David estimated this more

than doubled the overall average database load capacity.

The drives will also allow David to keep more billing

records in the database for Vail's clients to use as

trending data.

Eliminating Hard Disk Drive Delays

Communication hosting company allows customers to load and query billing records

much faster with dramatic database improvements powered by Virident FlashMAX.

Application Accelerated: Microsoft SQL Server.

David told us, "Before, a client billing query would take

seconds to complete because of queuing on the hard

disk drives, but now the disk queues have more or less

gone away. The Virident FlashMAX drives handle all the

random reads almost like RAM, and, at worst, write

queues last about a second instead of the minute they

used to take.”

An additional benefit that David noted was the superior

reliability of Vail's systems. With Virident, replication of

the database is significantly faster, and the overhead

does not affect the client query performance. Vail can

also do maintenance functions on the database at any

time. In addition, the company expects the lifetime of the

Virident boards to exceed the lifetime of the hard disk

drives.

"Hard disk drives have always been a significant source

of downtime in our datacenter," David said. "We expect

that by using the Virident flash-based solution, we'll see

the reliability of our systems and services improve.”

For Vail clients, any delay in accessing billing records

translates to delay in responding to their customer

issues. The improved database performance reduced

the average client's billing-record query time by as much

as a factor of ten.

Reliability

Improving customer care response time

"Virident FlashMAX delivered the best performance and

reliability for the money," David said. "Our other options

would have been to implement a SAN solution or move to

a NoSQL solution. Either of these would have required

significant development and investment in new

technology.”

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Hard Disk

Virident

FlashMAX

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In addition, Vail Systems expects to be able to service 2-

4 times more clients with great performance. The

significant performance improvement of the Virident

cards reduced the overhead of client query

performance on the server by more than 50 percent.

David told us that using Virident to improve

performance has helped Vail differentiate its offering as

a competitive advantage. Virident's solution enables Vail

to keep its implementation and support costs down

while enabling a significantly better experience for

clients.

Competitive Advantage

SummaryImplementing Virident gave Vail the following benefits:

A factor of ten reduction in average disk queue length

A five times improvement in average database

response time

Improved reliability

A two-to-four times improvement in database load

capacity

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About Vail SystemsVail Systems is an Enhanced Network Services provider

that develops, hosts and licenses scalable and extensible

customer care and conferencing solutions for service

providers and enterprises.

Vail offers customers a range of extensible, reliable and

scalable voice services from Hosted VoiceXML Platform

services for third-party developers looking to create

their own differentiated voice applications to turn-key

hosted voice application services such as Hosted IVR

and Speech-based Applications, Routing and Call

Control, Reservationless Conferencing, and Outbound

Notifications Services.

Vail Systems, based in Deerfield, Illinois (Chicago) has

been servicing customer's enhanced telephony needs

for over eighteen years. Vail Systems is a privately held

and self-funded organization that strives on delivering

the best value to meet our customers' and partners'

needs. Vail supports our customer's applications via our

24x7 N.O.C. that supports three carrier-grade

collocation facilities in Chicago, IL, Southfield, MI and

Aurora, CO.