Violin Case Study: SQL Server Data Warehouse

Violin  Case  Study:  SQL  Server       Data  Warehouse   Violin  Flash  Memory  Array  Demolishes  I/0  Limitations,  Reduces  Database   Processing  Times,  and  Lowers  Server  Licensing  Fees   Some  IT  investments  surpass  expectations  and  open  up  new  possibilities  for  conducting  business.   Consider  the  case  of  a  leading  nationwide  real  estate  information  company  based  in  California.  

The  Customer   For  more  than  30  years  this  Violin  Memory  customer  has  supplied  real  estate  information  solutions  to   thousands  of  commercial  users.    From  the  early  days  of  microfiche  to  today’s  high-­‐speed  Internet,  they   have  offered  the  most  current  and  advanced  marketing,  research,  valuation,  and  analytics  products  on   the  market.  Their  business  focuses  on  supplying  a  comprehensive  selection  of  property  data  products   and  services  to  help  real  estate  professionals  make  key  business  decisions,  market  more  effectively,   analyze  opportunities,  minimize  risk,  and  estimate  the  value  of  virtually  any  home  in  the  United  States.   The  products  and  services  result  from  processing  a  million  individual  records  daily.  They  furnish  their   data  products  and  services  through  an  online  subscription  delivery  model.  

The  Challenge   At  the  heart  of  this  customer’s  business  lie  a  series  of  SQL  Server  2000/2005/2008  databases  supporting   a  massive  data  warehouse,  various  individual  data  marts,  and  powering  data  mining,  analytics,  and   reporting  products  and  services.  The  leader  of  the  IT  team  noted;  “We  not  only  had  performance   challenges,  we  also  had  to  replicate  our  database  solutions  –  multiple  servers  and  databases  –  to  serve   multiple  products.”  The  IT  department  decided  to  consolidate  its  data  center  operations  in  an  attempt   to  improve  performance  and  reduce  the  time  required  to  ingest  the  massive  amounts  of  real  estate   transaction  data.  One  of  the  challenges  the  team  faced  was  how  to  improve  data  warehousing  in  an   input/output  (I/O)  -­‐limited  environment.  The  IT  team  evaluated  several  new  DAS  (Direct  Attach  Storage)   options  in  parallel  with  the  existing  EMC  storage  area  network  (SAN).  

The  Solution       The  IT  team  considered  options  such  as  deploying  a  higher  performance  and  certainly  much  more   expensive  SAN,  or  even  simply  outsourcing  the  entire  data  center.    A  trial  using  Violin‘s  Flash  Memory   Array  was  added  to  the  evaluation  mix.  The  results  of  these  tests  were  so  impressive  that  the  company   decided  to  use  Violin’s  Flash  Memory  Array  and  completely  revise  the  data  center  outsourcing  plan.   Two  Violin  Memory  3200  Flash  Memory  Arrays  were  deployed  with  the  intent  of  improving  the  I/O   performance  of  the  data  center.  Doing  so  would  reduce  the  time  needed  for  the  data  center  to  ingest   1    

the  massive  amounts  of  data  and  greatly  accelerate  the  report  generation  that  make  up  the  company’s   products  and  services.     Violin  Flash  Memory  Arrays  dramatically  reduce  latency  to  under  100  microseconds,  eliminating  the   multi-­‐millisecond  spikes  seen  in  today’s  SSD  and  PCIe  card  solutions.  A  single  Violin  Array  supports  10TB   of  Flash  capacity  in  a  3U  appliance.  It  consumes  80%  less  space  and  power  than  hard  disk  drive   performance  storage.  In  addition  to  significantly  increasing  density,  Violin  integrates  hot-­‐swappable   Flash  RAID  and  doubles  the  usable  capacity  compared  with  enterprise  SSD  solutions,  lowering  the  total   cost  of  enterprise-­‐grade  Flash  storage  by  more  than  50%.  Violin’s  Flash  technology  enables  over  220,000   sustained  random  write  inputs/outputs  per  second  (IOPS),  more  than  20  times  greater  than  Fiber   Channel  or  PCIe  based  SSDs.  Violin  products  with  Single  Level  Cell  (SLC)  Flash  enable  wear  leveling  across   the  entire  array  and  are  guaranteed  to  sustain  continuous  writes  over  a  projected  10  year  life,  double   the  industry  standard.  Unlike  SSDs,  all  workloads  are  supported  without  wear  being  a  concern  to  the   end-­‐user.   Substantially  increasing  application  performance  was  important  to  this  customer,  but  maintaining   mission-­‐critical  enterprise  reliability  was  also  a  priority.  With  recent  highly  publicized  storage  outages  at   government  facilities  and  other  private  sites,  Violin’s  Flash  Memory  Array  with  its  patented  switched-­‐ memory  technology,  hot-­‐swappable  modules,  and  Flash  RAID  became  an  easy  choice  to  ensure  both   performance  and  availability.   The  customer’s  IT  team  lead  described  the  system  architecture  solution  they  employed;  “We  redesigned   our  production  systems  to  use  a  mixture  of  Flash  storage  and  the  SAN  hard  disk  storage  so  that  we  can   take  advantage  of  Flash  performance  while  keeping  the  SAN  for  larger  storage  capacity  jobs  with  less   demanding  performance  requirements.”  He  continued,  “We  picked  out  the  databases  that  we  wanted   to  migrate  to  Flash  and  implemented  them  after  successful  testing.  Our  systems  administration  staff  did   a  great  job  putting  the  overall  design  on  paper  for  review  before  the  actual  implementation.  In  the  end,   it  was  a  fairly  smooth  transition.  The  only  application  failures  we  encountered  were  due  to  poor  coding   practice  revealed  because  the  Violin  Memory  Array  was  too  fast!”  

The  Results   The  results  for  this  Violin  customer  have  been  dramatic:  Violin  Flash  Memory  Arrays  allowed  the  IT  team   to  consolidate  13  production  servers  down  to  two.    The  IT  team  lead  stated;  “Some  of  our  data   processing  jobs  are  very  time  consuming.  To  process  a  data  extract  –  2,800  bytes  multiplied  by  10   million  records  –  took  us  six  hours  before;  now  it’s  down  to  one  and  a  half  hours  on  the  shared   production  system  with  the  Violin  Flash  Memory  Array.  On  the  data  mart  side,  the  performance   improvements  for  some  applications  are  staggering.  One  particular  8  million  record  processing  job  went   from  eight  hours  to  10  minutes!”   One  of  the  company’s  clients  requests  a  refresh  of  a  national  database  once  a  week.    Previously,  the  job   was  intentionally  scheduled  for  weekends  because  it  maximized  the  data  center’s  capacity  for  12  hours.  

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But  after  the  Violin  Flash  Array  was  deployed,  the  job  was  reduced  from  12  hours  to  two  hours  and  12   minutes.   Deploying  Violin  Memory  products  has  actually  changed  how  the  company  performs  daily  data  ingest   jobs  as  well.  It  used  to  run  the  jobs  at  night  when  many  employees  were  home,  but  now  that  limitation   is  gone.  Even  more  exciting  are  the  savings  on  capital  cost.  SQL  Server  licensing  is  assessed  on  a  per  core   basis;  consolidating  databases  that  previously  ran  across  13  (quad-­‐core)  servers  into  two  resulted  in  a   tremendous  reduction  in  licensing  expense.     Most  often,  companies  expect  higher  costs  with  solid  state  storage  but  hope  to  offset  these  higher  costs   by  increasing  their  revenue  generation  capacity.  The  opposite  was  true  in  this  case;  the  Violin  Flash   deployment  actually  led  to  reduced  costs.  As  the  company  VP  of  Operations  explained,  “We  didn’t  focus   on  revenue  payback  because  the  systems  were  capable  of  delivering  to  the  demand  of  sales.  Instead,   the  savings  came  from  the  cost  side;  by  consolidating  servers  we  were  able  to  re-­‐deploy  them  or  at  least   not  buy  new  ones.  Also,  the  reduction  in  power  and  cooling  consumption  brought  significant  cost   benefits.”  The  company  has  now  re-­‐deployed  11  servers  back  into  their  organization  and  use  their   existing  SAN  for  non-­‐I/O  intensive  applications.   The  VP  Operations  observed;  “These  results  are  so  impressive  that  we  have  changed  our  focus  from   datacenter  expansion  to  cost  avoidance  through  server  and  license  consolidation.  Because  we  are  no   longer  I/O  limited,  we  can  now  consider  how  to  improve  our  entire  business  model.”                                 3