Emergency Communications of Southern Oregon Opts for DataCore Hyper-Converged Virtual SAN

DataCore Software Corporation, announced that Emergency Communications of Southern Oregon (ECSO) has increased performance and reduced storage-related downtime with the DataCore Hyper-converged Virtual SAN.

Located in Medford OR, ECSO is a combined emergency dispatch facility and Public Safety Answering Point (PSAP) for the 9-1-1 lines in Jackson County.

It wanted to replace its existing solution because its dispatch application, based on SQL Server, was experiencing latencies of 200ms at multiple times throughout the day – impacting how fast fire and police could respond to an emergency. In addition to improving response time, it wanted a solution that could meet other requirements, including higher availability, remote replication, and a more robust storage infrastructure.

After considering various hyper-converged solutions, ECSO IT manager Corey Nelson decided that the DataCore Hyper-converged Virtual SAN meeting his technology and business objectives.

Hyper-converged Virtual SAN enables users to put the internal storage capacity of their servers to work as a shared resource while also serving as integrated storage architecture. ECSO runs Hyper-converged Virtual SAN on a single tier of infrastructure, combining storage and compute on the same clustered servers.

Performance Surges
Prior to DataCore, performance – specifically, latency – was a problem at ECSO, due to the organization’s prior disk array that took 200ms on average to respond. DataCore has solved the performance issues and fixed the real-time replication issues that ECSO was previously encountering because its Hyper-converged Virtual SAN speeds up response and throughput with its parallel I/O technology in combination with high-speed caching to keep the data close to the applications.

ECSO’s critical 9-1-1 dispatch application must interact nearly instantly with the SQL Server-based database. Therefore, during the evaluation and testing period, understanding response times were vital criteria. To test this, Nelson ran a SQL Server benchmark against his current environment as well as the DataCore solution. The benchmark used a variety of block sizes as well as a mix of random/sequential and R/W to measure the performance. The results: Hyper-converged Virtual SAN solution was 20X faster than the current environment.

“Response times are faster. The 200ms latency has gone away now with DataCore running,” stated Nelson. “In fact, we are down to under 5ms as far as application response times at peak load. Under normal load, the response times are currently under 1ms“

Management, Performance and Efficiency
Before DataCore, storage-related tasks were labor intensive at ECSO. Nelson was accessing and reviewing documentation continuously to ensure that any essential step concerning storage administration was not overlooked. He knew that if he purchased a traditional storage SAN, it would be yet another point to manage.

“I wanted as few ‘panes of glass’ to manage as possible,” noted Nelson. “Adding yet another storage management solution to manage would just add unnecessary complexity.“

The hyper-converged solution was what Nelson was looking for. DataCore has streamlined the storage management process by automating it and enabling IT to gain visibility to overall health and behavior of the storage infrastructure from a central console.

“DataCore has improved the efficiency, performance and availability of our storage infrastructure,” he said. “I was in the process of purchasing new hosts, and DataCore Hyper-converged Virtual SAN fit perfectly into the budget and plan. This is a very unique product that can be tested in anyone’s environment without purchasing additional hardware.”

Case study