Mattersight Deploys Pure Storage FlashArray

Pure Storage, Inc. announced that Mattersight Corporation, in SaaS-based enterprise analytics, has deployed the Pure Storage FlashArray FA-320 array to improve the company's ability to collect and analyze data in real-time.

All-flash storage arrays enabled the company to improve the storage efficiency of large databases, reduce analytics processing time from days to hours, and off-load a majority of the I/O load from their legacy tier 2 storage.

Every day, Mattersight captures over 70 trillion data attributes, applies over 2 million algorithms, executes over 250 billion computations, and processes over 350TB of data in order to provide its customers with new and contextually accurate information to understand their customers and improve their operations.

Mattersight uses its Business Monitoring Engine to capture, analyze and create business insights from unstructured conversations across all channels, allowing clients to predict customer and employee behavior, increase customer satisfaction and retention, and improve operational efficiency.

The Mattersight Business Monitoring Engine - one of hundreds of analytics applications the company runs on its large, consolidated FC SAN array - had the potential to absorb nearly all of the SAN array's I/O capacity, resulting in quality-of-service issues for all applications.

"Since our core competency is making information valuable, improving our ability to collect data, perform analytics and use these insights to improve customer experience and employee performance is critical," said Jeff Geltz, CIO of Mattersight. "The Mattersight Business Monitoring Engine is an I/O hungry application, and it was clear that traditional disk-based storage just wouldn't allow us to scale our business."

Over the course of a weekend, Mattersight migrated its Business Monitoring Engine to the FlashArray FA-320, and the results were immediate: the 600GB database stored on the SAN array was reduced by more than 9x - to just less than 65GB on the FlashArray. Mattersight conducted resiliency and performance testing post-migration to ensure the viability of running the Business Monitoring Engine on FlashArray and found that they were able to optimize the application without affecting other applications. Complementing a performance increase of more than 50%, the I/O on the traditional SAN array has been reduced to normal operating levels, enabling the proper function of all applications.

Results:

• Achieved 9-to-1 data reduction of MS SQL database
• Improved analytics processing time from over 24 hours to 2.5 hours
• Offloaded 70% of the I/O load from legacy tier 2 storage

"We were shocked that our 600GB database only required 65GB of capacity on the Pure Storage array," Geltz added. "The strength of the Pure Storage solution is its flexibility. We plan to use it as a first stop for new environment implementations going forward."

"Unstructured data is the fastest growing type of data in the datacenter, but it's also the data that contains the most value from an analysis perspective - the key to unlocking the value is the ability to efficiently process it," said Matt Kixmoeller, VP of products at Pure Storage. "Businesses for which revenue is tied to the analysis of unstructured client interaction data, like Mattersight, can rely on the Pure Storage FlashArray for a high-performance, highly-flexible and incredibly efficient storage solution on which to run analytics applications."