Potpourri Group Deploys Winchester Systems FlashServer

Winchester Systems Inc. announced the deployment of FlashServer
HA solutions at Potpourri Group, Inc.

PGI is a multi-brand direct marketers in
the US, offering an array of products including home décor, casual apparel,
gifts and accessories through catalogs and the Internet.

It needed to improve its online and
phone-sales transaction performance, especially during the busy winter holiday
season – and reduce operational risk and complexity.

"There
were monthly processes … that we would defer during ‘season,’ because they
were just so overhead intensive that it would impact our ability to take orders
at the speed we needed," explained Randall Davis, PGI’s VP of IT.

To make matters worse, the company was struggling with the complexity and
fragility of its clustered Oracle RAC database. "It got to the point where we just didn’t want to touch it,"
said Davis.

The solution: replace the company’s two
clustered-database servers with a single, purpose-built FlashServer HA system
and integrated SSD storage FlashServer HA takes a approach to assuring critical
workload uptime. Borrowing from the concept of RAID-1 hardware mirroring of
data between two disks, FlashServer HA uses special hardware to mirror
processing between two servers. Every CPU instruction, memory change or I/O
access is reflected across both system boards. If one server fails, the other
takes over processing immediately. Application workloads continue running
without any perceptible change in performance – and in-flight transactions
complete normally.

"We
loaded it up, went through a couple Oracle patch installs, and it was like
doing them on a standard server. The simplicity of doing things that needed
doing was there," said Davis. "Then we started yanking things: power cords, trays, and disk drives…
and it would just keep running. We had users on it, we had jobs running on it,
and nothing failed."

FlashServer HA integrated SSD storage
provided sorely needed database acceleration. And just in time for the holiday
season.

"This year we never had to defer
anything," said Davis. "We
just kept running our normal business the way we run it any other time of the
year." Internal users can generate as many reports as they need without
impacting customer transactions. FlashServer HA really has taken a lot of
worry off of my back. Before, I had to sit and
monitor the system, and shuffle processes or priorities around. This year I
didn’t have to do any of that."

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