IN THE INFORMATION technology industry, it is always best to be mindful of the need to prepare for the future. Almost every year, technology becomes twice as fast, or half the size, or half the cost; this applies in all disciplines, but is especially true in storage.
In this environment, organisations cannot simply purchase more hardware to keep up with the pace of storage advancements, as budgeting and cost efficiency must be considered at every turn. It goes without saying that the top-tier storage hardware of today will not be as effective in three or five years’ time. Businesses need to ensure that they are ready for expansion and development.
Fortunately, new software solutions exist that bring enhanced performance to existing storage hardware, without the need to rip and replace said hardware. At the same time, these software solutions lay a foundation
for future growth that is easy and cost effective, while minimising the risk of obsolescence.
Chr. Hansen, a food production company based in Denmark, is an example of a company that has transitioned to the software defined storage (SDS) age to increase the usability of their hardware, while saving substantial money on future storage upgrades in the process.
The company is a global supplier of bioscience based ingredients to the food, health and animal feeds industries. Producing cultures and dairy enzymes, probiotics and natural colours, Chr. Hansen’s market position is built upon product innovation and applications, production processes, long-term customer relationships and intellectual property. It is estimated that over the course of one week, one billion of the world’s population will have eaten Chr. Hansen’s products.
Per Helsbøl, Chr. Hansen’s IT infrastructure specialist and architect, is responsible for the smooth running of the company’s data centres and ensuring that IT delivers on the needs of the business. Mid-way through 2013 his main Oracle cluster was having performance issues.
Applications that used these databases “felt sluggish” and they had problems processing strategic business data. Analysis of their environment demonstrated that they didn’t have enough storage performance (i.e. IOs per second, or IOPS), resulting in a large number of user complaints.
Mr Helsbøl wanted to find an innovative solution to this issue that was inexpensive and did not require too much time. Initially, Mr Helsbøl looked at expanding the current clusters by buying more storage hardware and upgrading his servers.
The problem with these options was that they would have increased Chr. Hansen’s license and hardware costs substantially, by as much as Ä250,000 in some instances. Plus they would require a rip and replace of his existing storage environment.
In addition, Mr Helsbøl did not want to buy more storage capacity purely for extra IOPS. Instead, he wanted to get more performance while leveraging the capacity he had. So, a colleague recommended that Chr Hansen consider PernixData FVP software, which virtualises server-side flash and RAM to speed up application performance, while leveraging storage capacity offered by his existing storage hardware.
A trial demonstrated that PernixData FVP software was the solution that Chr. Hansen had been looking for. “FVP is extremely easy to install and we had no downtime during the installation process. The trial demonstrated great database performance even on low end SSDs,” commented Mr Helsbøl.
Following a straightforward implementation, the project delivered impressive application performance results. “We are now seeing faster response time on all SQL and Oracle servers, with lower utilisation on backend storage. Our production reports that took between 1-2 hours to run are now down to 15 to 25 minutes and our average response time on SQL and Oracle servers went down from 12 ms to less than 2 ms.”
“We run a highly specialised production environment, and our product needs to be kept at -57°C, otherwise the bacteria will start to grow. Time is of the essence to ensure we capitalise on what we produce. We were finding it difficult to move enough IOPS through our storage, resulting in long delays,” said Mr Helsbøl. By reducing the time it takes to run reports using PernixData FVP software,
Chr. Hansen hopes to increase production efficiency by moving the product from production to the shipping containers, avoiding the holding tanks altogether.
“Following this project, we now have a much faster process to decide whether production can ship or not. Previously, the production engineers had to wait for the reports, now they are more agile and work more efficiently.”
The future of storage is decoupled, leveraging new software solutions like FVP to
maximise performance while minimising IT costs.
In this way, companies can embrace the opportunity to be more flexible and in control of their storage environment, while simultaneously creating a more
efficient and high performing platform for virtualised data centres.
