British Red Cross Deploys Datacore Hypervisor

DataCore
Software Corporation announced that the British Red
Cross Society has deployed SANsymphony-V Storage Hypervisor to provide an acceleration on its new Online Analytical
Processing (OLAP) system to decrease the response times and increase the
reliability of the data extraction.

This performance improvement was achieved by installing SANsymphony-V on an HP
Proliant DL 370 server. This has reduced the time window needed to perform the
Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) operations from an average of 12 hours down
to four, with the load spread across half the number of internal hard disk
drives achieved through the SANsymphony-V’s thin
provisioning.

The British Red Cross Society is the UK registered
charity arm of the WW impartial humanitarian organisation, the International
Red Cross. Formed in 1870, the Red Cross has over 31,000 volunteers and 3,300
staff providing assistance and aid to all people in crisis, both in the UK and
overseas, without discrimination, regardless of their ethnic origin,
nationality or religion.

Kevin Bush is the technical architect within the
Charity’s MIS enterprise architecture team located in the City of London data
centre and head office. He explains: "In
order to sustain the Charity’s considerable ongoing work worldwide, the Red
Cross needs to continually generate additional income from new and existing
donors. It’s our function in MIS to ensure the relevant departmental units have
the appropriate infrastructure available to allow them to complete automated
processes in time to fulfil marketing campaigns to drive further donations."

To help facilitate ongoing fundraising, a
new suite of hardware and business intelligence tools were deployed six months
ago at the British Red Cross utilizing OLAP – an approach that swiftly answers
multi-dimensional analytical queries through accurate Business Intelligence
(BI) tools deployed on British Red Cross’ SQL Server database. BI data marts
are created to track behavioral changes, creating campaign relevancy trends for
business units.

This level of data profiling, specifying individual campaigns with matched
targets, entails I/O processing demands and depends on a stable, optimized
infrastructure. Working in conjunction with the MIS Enterprise Architecture
Team, British Red Cross’ partner, Adapto Ltd,
highlighted that deploying SANsymphony-V software could decrease the
I/O strain and increase performance in a cost effective, non-invasive way. SANsymphony-V,
otherwise known as the Storage Hypervisor, could improve performance levels by
increasing the speed of read/write requests across the entire British Red Cross
storage infrastructure using the storage server memory as the caching engine.
This caching could accelerate application response times manifesting in an increase
in speed of database query and extraction for the business units.

Critical to the effectiveness of the
Extract/Transform and Load (ETL) from the database is achieving ongoing consistency
that is contained within a predefined extraction window. Determining these two
factors is the speed of I/O to process workloads; a slow I/O equates to a long
and erratic extraction window. In practice, prior to the performance caching
gains, each ETL was taking between nine-15 hours, being set to run overnight
with the resultant data marts ready in time for the next working day.

Following Adapto’s suggestion, Kevin
downloaded the SANsymphony-V test drive and right away
ran a test ETL that displayed benefits through DataCore’s
caching ability, with the software recognizing I/O patterns to anticipate which
blocks to read next into RAM from the back-end disks. Requests became fulfilled
from memory at electronic speeds hiding the delay associate with the physical
disk I/O. The production-ready
GUI allowed the ETL to perform at blistering pace, similar to that achieved by
SSD but without the associated overheads. This manifested in a four hour query
extraction timeframe.

Kevin concludes: "From the point of evaluation onwards, we haven’t looked back with
SANsymphony-V. It’s caching and performance acceleration has certainly addressed
the consistency of extraction, whilst reducing the window to an acceptable
level, so that as a Charity, we can concentrate on effective fundraising to
help those most in need. We are so impressed that we are now looking at
installing another node of SANsymphony-V for HA and mirroring."