Scor Global Life Turns to Violin Memory Array

Violin Memory, Inc. was chosen by SCOR Global Life USA reinsurance company to accelerate its in-house Windows Server and SQL server-based applications.

Using a Violin 6000 Series Memory Array, SCOR was able to increase server performance by an average of four times, improve staff productivity, as well as provide timely year-end reports to reduce financial risk and meet compliance regulations. Reports that once required six full days using HDD drives took SCOR one day to complete with the solution.

The company’s in-house applications previously experienced high disk latency, in the 20ms range. While typical for spinning disk, the latency negatively impacted queries, slowing down nightly and yearly jobs, rendering operational inefficiencies and decreasing overall productivity. To make matters more critical, SCOR was making an acquisition in October, with year-end reports due in November. Processes needed to be accelerated to meet the compliance regulations of the accounting department.

“We knew of the performance and latency benefits of flash memory and that Violin led the market with its arrays, yet the results exceeded our expectations,” said Greg Clinton, VP of IT, SCOR. “We received exceptional and prompt customer service and were treated like a true partner. We didn’t feel like we were just a number in the system.“

To expedite the deployment of the flash memory array, the account team at Violin shipped the array overnight and installed it the following morning. By the end of the same day, SCOR migrated application data to the new system and experienced improved performance. Some applications saw performance acceleration of up to 12 times in contrast to the existing disk solution, and on average an increase of four times.

“Meeting regulatory requirements is more than a benefit-it’s the law,” said Narayan Venkat, VP of product management, Violin. “The performance delivered by Violin enabled the completion of time-critical applications and improved overall business productivity.“

6000 Series Flash Memory Arrays are designed to meet the performance, availability and scalability requirements of the demanding database applications.

• Deliver more than 1 million IO/s;
• Scale from 8TB to 64TB of memory capacity;
• Provide I/O access with latency measured in microseconds;
• Plug into existing SAN.