Condusiv Case Studies

Creative Office Pavilion comprises a team of designers, architects, and project managers who work with massive drawings, PowerPoints, and database files. When application latency began to plague IT, the team needed a seamless solution to get business back on track— delivering the best possible experience to their users, with applications running at peak performance.

THE CUSTOMER

“People ignore design that ignores people.” This maxim defines the culture and design principles at Creative Office Pavilion. Modern and clean, yet engaging and functional, Creative Office Pavilion delivers workplace solutions for financial institutions, hospitals, tech companies—even Harvard University enlisted them to design and build its Innovation Lab.

Headquartered in Boston, with nine branches and showrooms on the east coast, Creative Office Pavilion offers consulting, design, project management, inventory management, and warehouse services to a customer base that covers a range of markets. But Creative Office Pavilion not only takes its design principles seriously—it takes its company culture to the next level, strongly promoting core values of respect, teamwork, and communication.

THE CHALLENGE

An environment of collaboration means an environment that supports working seamlessly across locations, at customer sites, and handling a variety of platforms and endpoints. Creative Office Pavilion’s IT team manages a lot of data and heavy workload generated by an order entry system, CRM application, Lotus Notes, SQL Server, and hundreds of employees constantly accessing data that consists of architect drawings, massive PowerPoint presentations, and database files.

According to Robert Del Vecchio, IT Infrastructure Manager, his primary challenge was to “get data to his users quicker, without sluggishness.” He says, “We support a large team of designers, mobile CRM users, support staff, accounting, and customer service, so performance problems affect every corner of our business.” He adds, “Eliminating performance calls had to be our first priority.” Robert and the team were spending a disproportionate amount of time on server and storage health checks. “We were spending so much time troubleshooting, there was little time left for R&D or discovering new technologies,” he explains.

THE SOLUTION

Finding V-locity was a “happy accident,” according to Robert—the result of searching online for SQL and application performance. After evaluating V-locity in a test environment, Robert’s team saw immediate improvement. “Not only did we see performance increase right away, I was no longer running to every server doing health checks constantly.” “To top it off,” he adds, “running V-locity was seamless. I just checked the logs occasionally to make sure it was doing what it should, and that was it.” After testing, Robert and team were convinced. “We deployed V-locity on every server in our VMware cluster to maintain the SAN because of the amount of traffic we have.” He continues, “We’re not a gigantic enterprise, but we’re big enough that we need this technology to keep us up and running efficiently.”

V-locity software is a complement to the storage, virtualization, and networking technologies that Creative Office Pavilion was already running its data center. Because V-locity is installed on all Windows VMs at the operating system layer, it optimizes I/O at the source and reduces the I/O requirement for any given file. By preventing a surplus of I/O from getting funneled into servers, network, and storage, the entire infrastructure (compute, network, and storage) derives benefit because only productive I/O is generated by the VM. With IntelliWrite technology, V-locity automatically prevents split I/Os from being generated, allowing more data to be packaged on every write. With IntelliMemory, V-locity caches active data in available server memory to further reduce I/O demand on storage devices.

As a certified VMware-ready solution, V-locity automatically and transparently improves application throughput and latency on heavy workloads running on x86 platforms.

THE RESULT

Creative Office Pavilion has been running V-locity over a year, giving Robert more than sufficient time to observe not only its impact on application and storage performance, but on deferring investment in additional hardware. “We’re past the usual lifecycle for a SAN,” he says, “but with V-locity, there is no need to upgrade or replace it. I can supplement it, but I don’t have to replace it.” And Robert was surprised at the dramatic impact on the organization’s slow backups. “The decrease in I/O being pushed to disks has been so dramatic that our full backups went from being measured in a day to being measured in a few hours.”

But the most significant impact has been on application performance. “We no longer have latency issues—everything runs as efficiently as possible. Considering the number of users, the size of the files they work with, and the I/O-intensive workload we handle, there’s a lot of potential for complaints.” He says, “Since V-locity, we have none—those issues don’t exist.”

Robert’s team uses V-locity’s Benefit Analyzer, an embedded reporting tool, to run monthly checks on I/O and workload performance. “With V-locity, we’ve seen an 80-90% improvement in response time for SQL, email, CRM, and other critical apps.” With visibility into I/O and workload behavior, the team can track performance from applications to servers and storage. “I wouldn’t run our environment without it,” he says. “V-locity is proactive, it’s seamless, and I’d recommend it to any organization with significant I/O demand along with users that need top performance.”