Retail Chain WE Fashion Dresses Up SQL Server Performance With PernixData

PernixData, Inc., in server-side storage intelligence, announced that WE Fashion (WE Europe B.V.), a Dutch-based fashion chain that sells clothing, shoes, bags and other accessories in Europe, has deployed its FVP software to optimize the performance of virtualized databases used for business critical cash register operations.

WE Fashion is a large retail chain with approximately 240 shops and 3,000 employees in the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, France, Luxembourg, Austria and Switzerland. The company has SQL databases in place for OLTP/OLAP functions pertaining to their cash register software. After the company added a variety of applications, they noticed storage performance slow down considerably, which hampered the productivity of employees using this software.

“We considered an upgrade to more expensive storage systems, but the cost was prohibitive. With the free trial and minimal effort to install, PernixData’s FVP software was the quickest solution to implement, and yielded the best results,” said Roy Pellegrom the systems administrator, WE Fashion.

FVP is an infrastructure element of any virtualized data center. The software virtualizes server side flash and memory into a clustered acceleration tier that enables IT administrators to optimize VM performance while scaling-out storage performance with compute resources.

According to Pellegrom, with PernixData FVP software in place (in conjunction with Dell branded Intel DC S3700 SSDs and IBM System Storage DS3400), “the storage latency has been reduced from 30-40ms down to 0.1-1.5ms, which has resulted in a big chunk of daily ‘wait time’ being removed. Before, the users had to schedule a whole work day to do some database testing. Now, with PernixData FVP software installed, they can do the same tests in under 2 hours. The day-to-day tasks run much quicker, which means they are more productive.“

“We were searching for a high value investment to boost our virtualized environment,” said Pellegrom. “Upgrading our storage would have cost us 6x more than the PernixData solution, and would have yielded less impressive performance gains, making this a real no-brainer.“