Case studies / Case Management Solutions
Case Management Solutions Turns to V-locity I/O Reduction Software to Solve Slow MS-SQL Performance
“When Condusiv says they guarantee to fix application performance issues on Windows servers, that’s exactly what they do. We can attest to everything they claim as being true.”
Challenges
- User complaints related to sluggish MS-SQL performance
- Expensive fork-lift upgrades to all-flash was not an option
Benefits
- 50% or greater application performance improvement – with no additional hardware
- Latency and throughput dramatically improved
- True “set and forget” management
- Compatible with all SAN/NAS systems
- Easily deploys 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 VM to storage
Features
IntelliWrite® I/O reduction technology
automatically prevents split I/Os from being generated when a file is typically broken into pieces before write and sequentializes otherwise random I/O generated by the “I/O blender” effect.
IntelliMemory® intelligent caching technology
caches active data from read requests using available server memory.
“Time Saved” Benefits Dashboard Shows the ongoing benefit of the software by revealing the amount of I/O offloaded from storage and how much time that saves.
Benefit Analyzer™ embedded benchmark provides before/after performance comparisons prior to installing V-locity and after
Case Management Solutions most mission critical and I/O-intensive application sat on top of a MS-SQL database and had become notoriously slow over time. Files with as many as 500 pages for a particular client would need to be processed to or from their NAS storage, and stole far too much time from employee productivity due to sitting and waiting for it to complete. They turned to their value-added reseller, Dealflow, for an answer that wouldn’t break their budget.
THE CUSTOMER
Case Management Solutions has been providing nationwide case management and cost containment services within the workers’ compensation and disability market since 1994.
THE CHALLENGE
Each day, employees at Case Management Solutions rely on their Timeslip application that sits on a MS-SQL database and processes large files to and from their NAS storage. Over time, the system had become progressively slower, which became one of the biggest points of frustration among the staff.
“If a file was 50 pages long, I would sit and watch the page count loading all 50 pages before printing the report. Some of the files we process are more than 500 pages, so I think you can imagine the pain,” said Hal Brooks, Managing Partner, Case Management Solutions.
The problem wasn’t just the time it took to process files, but employees would sit and wait to log into the system and experience delays when going from page to page within the application. Hal reached out to Dealflow, a Condusiv authorized reseller, who specializes in building IT solutions to solve customer pain points.
“Case Management Solutions shared with us the pain they were experiencing and the need to find the most cost-effective solution possible. We quickly spotted some necessary server upgrades, but after having seen what V-locity® I/O reduction software had done for our other clients, we knew that was likely the only missing ingredient to tackle their performance issues,” said Lee Owens, VP of Sales, Dealflow.
THE SOLUTION
Condusiv’s V-locity I/O reduction software is “set and forget” software that runs transparently in the background on Windows servers and automatically offloads I/O from underlying storage, then streamlines the I/O traffic that remains. All of this is done with near-zero overhead to the CPU.
First, V-locity eliminates excessively small, fractured writes and reads and displaces them with large, clean contiguous writes, so more payload is carried with every I/O operation to maximize server and storage performance.
Second, V-locity establishes a tier-0 caching strategy by using idle, available DRAM to serve hot reads. Nothing has to be allocated for cache, since V-locity dynamically adjusts to only what is otherwise unused. With as little of 2GB of available memory, many customers serve as much as 50% of their read traffic. As a result, most V-locity customers experience at least 50% faster application performance, with many workloads getting much more, depending on the extent of Windows write inefficiencies and how much memory is available.
Diskeeper, V-locity, and SSDkeeper have been revolutionized into one new product – DymaxIO.
THE RESULT
“After we completed the server upgrades, we installed Condusiv’s I/O reduction software. After just one week, the software eliminated over 1 million I/O operations from being served from storage and Case Management Solutions saw exactly the kind of performance they were hoping to see. Even their backup times dropped,” said Owens.
“Query times improved by 4X. Employees no longer had to wait to login or process files, and no longer experienced delays when going from page to page within the app. Instead of watching all 50 pages count up before printing, it’s almost instantaneous,” said Brooks.
“From our perspective, when Condusiv says they guarantee to fix application performance issues on Windows servers, that’s exactly what they do. We can attest to everything they claim as being true. It has helped all of our customers remove sluggishness from their most important applications,” said Owens.
Owens continued, “Once they put V-locity into play, the only thing they are upset about is not doing it earlier.”
When quantifying the business benefit of V-locity, Brooks said, “It enables employees to complete at least one or two more cases in a single day. That’s big for us.”