The Allant Group Improves Performance “by 10x” on Oracle Databases

Nimbus Data Systems, Inc. announced that The Allant
Group, Inc., a provider of marketing analytics solutions, has selected the
Nimbus S-Class flash memory platform to power its Oracle databases.

Compared with its existing high-end 150-spindle disk array, the Nimbus S-Class
delivered up to 10 times greater transaction performance, accelerating
processing jobs and alleviating IO bottlenecks that had previously forced
database administrators to drop and rebuild indexes frequently. Furthermore,
the efficiency of the flash technology simplified The Allant Group’s
datacenter operations, freeing rack space, cooling resources, and energy to
support future growth.

"The introduction of Nimbus S-Class
dramatically improved our Oracle database performance and eliminated tedious
workarounds that previously consumed a significant amount of valuable DBA time
and energy," said Dan Otterness, enterprise infrastructure architect
of The Allant Group. "Most
impressive is watching the affordable, compact and easy-to-use Nimbus system
outgunning our vastly larger and energy hungry 15K disk array by 10 times. We
view Nimbus’ flash technology as a significant enhancement to the success of
our Oracle environment and see this as disruptive technology for such
transactional workloads."

According to Gartner, Oracle’s database revenue grew 28% in Q4 of 2011 and 26%
so far this year, accounting for 34% of its revenue, but maximizing database
performance is a serious challenge. Performance, low-latency storage is
essential in OLTP workloads. Reducing latency
increases transactions per second, which in turn accelerates business operations
and boosts profitability.

While some database users have turned to proprietary database appliances,
costly cache-heavy disk arrays, or complex storage techniques like
short-stroking, users like The Allant Group have discovered a simpler approach – moving away from spinning disk arrays to flash memory
technology for all database storage. Unlike tiering, an all-flash storage
system delivers low latency while reducing operating expenses by
80% compared to disk arrays.

"As IT environments continue to
scale in both size and complexity, we see application owners with an increasing
need for more performance to handle business critical databases," said
Gene Ruth, research director at Gartner. "All-flash solutions architected like this enable flexibility for Oracle
administrators while delivering increased performance and efficiencies that
competing solutions simply cannot. Flash technology is empowering customers to
meet the challenging requirement to improve processes in today’s high
performance applications while shrinking the datacenter footprint dramatically."

"We are delighted to support The
Allant Group’s next-generation Oracle infrastructure," stated Thomas
Isakovich, CEO of Nimbus Data Systems. "DBA’s have long struggled with disk arrays, going through all sorts of
configuration complexity in hopes of reducing latency by a millisecond or two.
As this win demonstrates, organizations that deploy Nimbus flash memory systems
can eliminate decades of disk array tuning challenges and supercharge database
performance, increasing revenue opportunities and improving quality of service."