Tecplot Deploying PernixData FVP Software

PernixData, Inc., in virtualizing server flash, announced that Tecplot, Inc., provider of data visualization and analysis software, has leveraged PernixData FVP to improve overall storage performance and support a growing virtualized environment.

In early 2013, Tecplot invested in additional compute resources for their infrastructure to support virtualized build systems and faster code compiling. While this provided a significant benefit to the software development team, the performance bottleneck shifted to the storage infrastructure. This also impacted other business critical systems that ran off of the shared storage system.

“Our initial plan was to invest in more spindles, faster spindles, or some hybrid flash/spinning disk solution built into an array,” said Pete Koehler, Tecplot’s IT manager and virtualization architect. “With this approach, we knew the additional costs were going to be significant because our legacy 1GbE storage fabric also needed to be upgraded to support the increased traffic. And even with a significant financial investment, we were probably going to end up with just modest performance improvements.”

Tecplot faced the common dilemma of outgrowing storage performance capabilities as their virtualized environment grew. To avoid a complete overhaul of their storage infrastructure, Tecplot turned to server side flash technology and selected FVP for its ability to support true write-back caching. FVP is coupled with the hypervisor to provide an available pool of cache that provides the safety needed when accelerating writes, without compromising feature-sets in vSphere.

“We believed server side flash could provide a more scalable and cost-effective way of addressing our storage performance challenges. But, we needed a software solution to make it truly usable across our virtual data center,” said Koehler. “PernixData helped us avoid a substantial SAN upgrade, which would have cost tens of thousands of dollars. Based on that fact alone, I believe flash virtualization is absolutely the right way to go.”

FVP was integrated with Tecplot’s existing infrastructure, from servers and storage to hypervisors and VMs. The performance improvements reduced storage workloads from 100% around the clock to a 65% storage workload. In addition, adding the FVP technology delivered a 2.3 times performance improvement in the company’s compiling application, above and beyond the initial performance gains from added compute power.

 
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