The 888 Group, in Online Gaming, Adopts OCZ ZD-XL SQL Accelerator

OCZ Storage Solutions, a Toshiba Group company, announced that The 888 Group (888 Holdings Public Limited Company), an online gaming provider, has reduced SAN bottlenecks and improved SQL Server performance for its 888.com gaming website using its ZD-XL SQL Accelerator.

With ZD-XL SQL Accelerator’s ability to provide optimized flash caching for hot SQL Server data enabled The 888 Group to accelerate database performance while reducing I/O traffic placed on its SAN by 50%. No new SAN equipment, upgrades or additional HDDs were required saving The 888 Group from IT purchases in 2013.

The combination of more content being added to its data warehouse, more data analysis to improve business intelligence, and more transactions being processed, data traffic within The 888 Group’s SQL Server environment increased substantially causing disk I/O bottlenecks, system performance limitations and costly upgrades.

The SQL Server database did not scale very well using conventional HDDs and adding more to the SAN drove up TCO and TOC in the enterprise increasing SAN equipment purchases, power and cooling consumption, as well as maintenance, service and deployment costs.

The storage challenges that The 888 Group faced required solid-state capabilities that enable flash caching and improve SQL Server data warehouse access, OLTP and OLAP.

With the mantra of improving database performance while reducing I/O workload traffic and the strain it placed on its SAN, The 888 Group selected ZD-XL SQL Accelerator, an integrated hardware/software solution designed to provide optimized and efficient flash acceleration of SQL Server applications. It delivers fast flash speed and a cache mechanism that makes statistically-optimized decisions on what data to cache. This ability to partition its flash volumes enabled The 888 Group’s temporary database (tempDB) files, such as transient calculation tables, to benefit from flash performance while hot data was cached on flash locally for immediate use by SQL Server resulting in optimized and accelerated data types.

“ZD-XL SQL Accelerator has performed very well, increasing ETL (Extract/Transform/Load) performance while alleviating storage I/O leaving enough room for other applications to use the performance benefits of flash storage,” said Tzahi Hakikat, ICT, The 888 Group. “Each year, we upgrade main storage to a more powerful system, and this year for the first time as a result of our ZD-XL SQL Accelerator deployment, we didn’t have to.”

When compared to The 888 Group’s SAN configuration without accelerated flash caching, ZD-XL SQL Accelerator with its proprietary Direct Pass Caching Technology and flash volume partitioning reduced the average I/O load on the SAN from 23,000 I/O operations down to 11,000. This result is not just about how many IO/s were delivered by ZD-XL SQL Accelerator, but more critical about the effect that I/O database loads have on data traffic to the SAN. As a result, ZD-XL SQL Accelerator was able to improve SQL Server performance even in an environment with a full tier of SSDs and HDDs, auto-tiering and internal caching.

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