Admiral Metals Doubles Performance for Business Critical Applications with Condusiv I/O Reduction Software

Top Quote V-locity Reduces I/O from Virtual Server to Storage to Help Metals Company to Achieve More than 50% Performance Gains on their Existing Hardware Infrastructure. End Quote
  • (1888PressRelease) November 26, 2015 - BURBANK, CA - Condusiv® Technologies, the world leader in software-only storage performance solutions for virtual and physical server environments, today announced that Admiral Metals has experienced dramatic benefits leveraging Condusiv V-locity® I/O Reduction Software. As a result, the company doubled its business critical application performance without having to add additional hardware.

    Admiral Metals has delivered competitively priced, highest-grade metals with superb machinability since 1950. The company focuses on dedication, reliability, and commitment to customer care and fosters long-standing relationships with metal suppliers to facilitate delivery of top-notch metal tubes, rods and bars, sheet metal, and other shapes with precision accuracy.

    As a customer-centered organization with a large team of service professionals accessing several workload-heavy applications, Admiral Metals needed monitoring tools for VMware to be able to determine which machines in virtual host were running optimally and which ones weren't, based on data such as workload and peak times. Admiral's work environment relied on Windows Server 2008 and 2012 R2 operating systems These applications were large I/O consumers that increasingly ate up more IOPS, making the company's SAS storage system struggle to keep up and causing sluggish performance systemwide.

    Admiral Metals wanted to avoid having to continue scheduling a system reboot each week to refresh services because of significant dips in performance during peak workloads. The company considered an expensive storage hardware upgrade, but decided to turn to Condusiv to implement V-locity.

    "We tried a demo of V-locity and saw an immediate reduction in I/O which led to a 50% improvement in application I/O," said Matt Skelley, Senior Systems Administrator and Engineer at Admiral Metals. "I thought their I/O reduction software approach was very compelling versus throwing more flash and spindles at the problem-which only addresses the symptom but not the real problem of small, random, fractured I/O that penalizes application performance the most. We have been using V-locity for four years now and are extremely pleased with the performance and value.

    V-locity 6.0 contains two key technologies that reduce I/O from VM to storage. The first patented engine, IntelliWrite®, increases I/O density and sequentializes traffic from VM to storage by adding a layer of intelligence into the Windows OS that eliminates I/O fracturing. This reduces the I/O requirement for any given workload and increases throughput since more data is processed with each I/O operation. The second patented technology, IntelliMemory®, is a DRAM read caching engine that dynamically uses available DRAM. Just 3GB of DRAM reduces I/O response time by 40% on average.

    Admiral Metals has been able to reduce the IOPS requirements from its underlying storage subsystem by nearly half during peak application usage on their heaviest workloads.

    In addition to realizing the 50% decrease in I/O from VM to storage according to daily averages and peaks in workload, the company now also enjoys a number of the software's other key features since switching to V-locity, including its reporting capabilities and alerts for optimal performance and systems health.

    "With V-locity's seamless policy-based monitoring, I can now always see the pulse of the health of our environment," said Skelley. "That's a huge help, as are the alerts that show thresholds on VMs. We now never have any threshold problems even during our heaviest workloads because of V-locity."

    Since installing V-locity, Admiral Metals has eliminated the need to purchase more hardware and can now leverage the company's current infrastructure-as well as existing DRAM-to boost performance. This has resulted in a cost-savings model of 70% compared to installing new hardware, which only temporarily addresses the problem. "To be honest, I haven't found a weak point in V-locity," said Skelley. "The software allows us to get the most from the hardware we already have by ensuring the fastest storage media in our infrastructure is being fully utilized instead of sitting idle."

    "Most organizations continue to do what they've always done to solve I/O performance, which is simply throw more expensive flash or spindles at the problem," said Brian Morin, SVP, Global Marketing and Product Management, Condusiv Technologies. "However, this band-aid procedure doesn't solve the two big I/O inefficiencies in virtual environments that robs 50% of I/O bandwidth from VM to storage with I/O characteristics that are much smaller, more fractured and more random than they need to be. V-locity I/O reduction software cures the problem giving customers like Admiral Metals a near 50% decrease in the number of I/Os from VM to storage resulting in huge application performance gains on their existing hardware."

    To read the complete Condusiv customer case, please visit: Admiral Metals Case Study

    Tweet this: . ( @ ) Condusiv V-locity Software Reduces I/O requirement by 50% for Admiral Metals

    About Condusiv
    Condusiv® Technologies is the world leader in software-only storage performance solutions for virtual and physical server environments, enabling systems to process more data in less time for faster application performance. Condusiv's V-locity® I/O reduction software greatly reduces I/O overhead in virtual environments by eliminating the performance penalty from mixing uncoordinated, contentious and disruptive I/O streams from multiple virtual machines (the "I/O blender" effect). As a result, customers experience a minimum of 50% faster performance gains on their heaviest workloads. Condusiv's Diskeeper® storage performance solution is the #1 real-time fragmentation prevention solution for Windows servers and clients, keeping servers, desktops and laptops running like new permanently. With over 50 million licenses sold, Condusiv solutions are used by 90% of the Fortune 1000 and almost three-quarters of the Forbes Global 100 to increase business productivity and reduce datacenter costs while extending the life of existing hardware.

    Media contacts: Condusiv Technologies, Dawn Richcreek, drichcreek ( @ ) condusiv dot com, 818 dot 252 dot 5596

    Press Contact:
    Sabrina Sanchez
    The Ventana Group
    Chantilly, VA
    (925) 785-3014
    ssanchez ( @ ) theventanagroup dot com
    http://www.theventanagroup.com

    ###
space
space
  • FB Icon Twitter Icon In-Icon
Contact Information