Admiral Metals With Condusiv I/O Reduction Software

Condusiv Technologies Corp. announced that Admiral Metals has experienced benefits leveraging its 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 OSs These applications were large I/O consumers that increasingly ate up more IO/s, making the company’s SAS storage system struggle to keep up and causing sluggish performance system wide.

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, 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 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 uses available DRAM. 3GB of DRAM reduces I/O response time by 40% on average.

Admiral Metals has been able to reduce the IO/s 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 also enjoys a number of the software’s other 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 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. “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.“

Case study