… As Well as French Veolia Environnement

Violin Memory, Inc. announced that French-based environmental services company, Veolia Environnement, selected its flash memory array solutions.

They have provided Veolia near real-time access to business critical data and made the billing process four times faster.

Veolia Environnement provides services such as supplying fresh water, recycling waste water, collecting, treating and recycling domestic and commercial waste, and supplying heat and cooled air. To meet its SLAs, the business relies on its ability to store, share and access the latest data; for instance the weight of all the waste collected in a specific location that same day. Such information allows the business to be more agile by monitoring daily revenue and providing better, more targeted customer service.

Before switching to Violin solutions, Veolia relied on a legacy system that was struggling to meet SLAs for its very I/O intensive billing application. The high latency of the disk-based storage array eventually became a bottleneck to the point where Veolia management waited days to receive revenue figures.

The problem came to a head as Veolia planned to move 70 of its databases and its IT infrastructure based in 70 different locations throughout France to one single server. Following the installation of the Violin arrays, the streamlined server is used by more than 5,000 employees. The arrays are also set to handle data from 38 databases through its DIVA database, and around a further 100 SQL database applications by 2014.

Tests by Veolia showed that flash memory arrays reduced batch processing time during work hours so management can now view critical data first thing the following day. Veolia also cut the company’s heaviest query processing time, such as trend and charge back reports for billing, and their related costs.

Veolia CTO said: “The Violin memory arrays have accelerated the way we do business. We need data in real-time to get an accurate and reliable picture of how we are doing at any given time. In the past, having to wait for data to become available was frustrating. With the Violin Memory flash technology, the data is ready and waiting for us whenever we need it.“

Mick Bradley, MD, Violin Memory EMEA, said: “Every organisation needs to know what is happening throughout its operation in a timely manner. Without that information it’s impossible to plan ahead, to deal with issues quickly, and even to manage customers’ accounts effectively. Our flash memory arrays have given Veolia near real-time access to that data; giving the business a marked advantage over its competition.“

Before selecting Violin memory array solutions, Veolia looked at an SSD based solution with two major storage vendors (cards and SSD drives). Both fell short of the performance, reliability, and cost-effectiveness of Violin solutions. In fact, the Violin memory arrays sped up both sequential and random R/W processing by four times.