Alacritech Accelerators Increase Server Utilization of Northcentral University

Alacritech Inc announced that Northcentral University relies on Alacritech’s Scalable Network Accelerators (SNAs) to ensure high performance server utilization. As an accredited online university, Northcentral University provides graduate and undergraduate degree programs in business and technology management, education and psychology to more than 7,500 students each semester. The improved server performance, experienced with the Alacritech SNAs, allows Northcentral University to provide students with reliable access to lectures and class notes as well as to complete coursework and contribute to class discussions 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

With 100 percent of its classes online, Northcentral University has seen increased demand on its database, email and file servers. Fast access to data is extremely important. By deploying Alacritech SNAs in each SQL server, the TCP processing burden is taken off of the processor and placed on the network card. As a result of the SNA addition, the University has dramatically improved server performance and has increased utilization by more than 25 percent.

"Our ability to ensure high performance content delivery on the Web no matter the time of day or night is really a lifesaver for our students who access the university entirely online," said Gary Waltman, systems administrator, Northcentral University. "This is possible because the Alacritech SNAs allow the servers to focus exclusively on delivering content."

By migrating to a central iSCSI storage environment and allowing the server to focus exclusively on application processing and data serving, the Alacritech SNAs have dramatically improved performance throughout the central IT environment. With the improved server performance, the University is able to take advantage of the scalability, manageability and redundancy benefits of iSCSI storage. In turn, the re-engineered storage environment is better suited to support the growing demand for rich multimedia content.

Alacritech SNAs are installed in each of Northcentral University’s HP ProLiant DL380 servers running the university’s backend SQL databases. With overall utilization increased by 25 percent, Waltman suspects that the improved application performance will make the servers more resilient. Over time, Northcentral University will be able to consolidate servers and keep them in production longer, saving operating and capital costs.

Alacritech’s storage and network accelerators are specifically designed to increase both file and block transport while achieving system scalability. Deploying Alacritech’s dynamic TCP offload cards results in fewer servers required, less capital, fewer licenses, support requirements and less power consumed.