Vail Systems Case Study – How FlashMax accelerated their SQL server database performance
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Transcript of Vail Systems Case Study – How FlashMax accelerated their SQL server database performance
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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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.