Vail Systems Deploys Virident SSD Solution

Virident, Inc., in flash-based Storage Class Memory (SCM) solutions, announced that Vail Systems, Inc., a network
services provider, has purchased the Virident FlashMAX solution to improve the
response time of its customer-care database.

Vail System’s clients base their customer care on its hosting solutions, but
existing hard disk drives were unable to support the desired response time to
customer queries regarding billing records. With FlashMAX, response time has
dropped from an average of five seconds to real time: as low as 500
milliseconds.

Hosting company
Vail Systems processes more than 48 million billing records a day. It handles its customer billing records database in a SQL
Server, but the company’s usage model made it difficult to maintain performance
with the system’s hard disk drives. Each billing-record call created multiple
sequential database writes that blocked read access until they were completed,
and billing-record writes add more than 4.5GB to the database each day.

Client queries required significant disk access because the server’s memory
could not handle random access across the whole database. The databases are
mirrored for redundancy, but while redundant writes occurred, they effectively
blocked read operations.

"We needed to eliminate
the disk-drive bottleneck without changing the architecture of the billing
system or the customer-care interface," said David Fruin, Vail
Systems’ VP of engineering. "Re-engineering
the billing system on a No-SQL solution wouldn’t achieve these goals. We found
that upgrading to Virident’s FlashMAX boards dramatically increased performance
without requiring us to make any other changes. And the improved performance
has helped us differentiate our offerings as a competitive advantage."

Replacing HDDs with FlashMAX
provided
Vail Systems with  benefits:

• The provider expects its improved billing system will be able to
  service two to four times more clients.
• Overhead of client-query performance on the SQL server is down by
  more than 50%.
• Database load capacity has doubled, allowing to store
  more billing records for clients to use as trending data.
• Hard drives had been a significant source of downtime; Vail Systems
  expects the flash-based solution will improve the reliability of its
  systems and services.