Server Flash and Flash Hypervisor solution lowers app latency, increases server consolidation

http://www.kingston.com/business/case_study/pernix
Kingston's IT managers implemented server consolidation and disaster recovery initiatives which included virtualizing tier-1 applications. This project led to storage performance concerns. Kingston looked at ways to leverage server-side flash solutions to accelerate virtualized server workloads and prolong the service life of legacy storage systems and ultimately chose the PernixData FVP solution using Kingston enterprise-class SSDs. This combination allowed the Kingston Corporate IT department to scale out a data tier to accelerate the primary storage, lower application latency and increase server consolidation.

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Closed Caption:

My name is Tran Phan. I am the senior storage virtualization administrator here at Kingston.
My role within the company is to make sure the network infrastructure
storage, and virtualization infrastructure is maintained on a daily basis.
For us disaster recovery was to be able to have the applications hosted here
But in the event that the site went offline,
we can turn those services on at a different location.
In order to do that we had to virtualize all the work loads
because virtualization allowed us to move those workloads between sites fairly easy,
compared to a physical server, we would have to build like-for-like hardware at each site.
Initially we intended to only virtualize non-mission critical work loads.
Once those were virtualized, we realized the benefits it would provide if we virtualize our tier one mission critical workloads.
Unfortunately, our storage platform wasn't sized to handle that type of workload.
The first option we have was obviously,
we can upgrade our current SAN (storage area network).
Add more hardware, more spindles to gain the performance we had.
The other solution we looked at was to leverage Kingston SSD or Flash technology within the server
to help accelerate those workloads and prolong legacy storage.
We looked at several solutions that provided server side caching.
We looked at Atlantis computing.
We also looked at Fusion IO, as well as Pernix.
In the end we chose Pernix because we really like how this software was architected.
It operated at a host extension level,
It leveraged our Kingston SSDs,
we didn't have to deploy virtual clients to manage the software,
we didn't have to install any type of third party HBAs (host bus adapter) into the servers to get the software working.
Overall the installation was so simple.
The installations guide was only seven pages, including screen shots.
I think anyone that's an entry-level, junior admin, storage admin can deploy this solution.
Once we had the solution online,
we monitored for several weeks, just to make sure everything was running,
and what we saw was, we saw a dramatic reduction on the storage CPU utilization
and as well as the disk utilization.
We saw latency drop from 30 milliseconds plus
to around five milliseconds on certain workloads, peak.
As a result, a lot of the applications ran a lot smoother.
We stopped getting calls from service desk, and everything was great.
Had we gone with the hardware solution it would have cost us X amount.
Whereas when we went with the Kingston/Pernix solution,
we were able to save about fifty percent of that cost.
By having a Kingston/Pernix solution in place were able to
prolong the life of our current storage platform by two to three years.
Now that we have the solution in place
we realize that if we're faced with storage challenges at other remote sites
we do have a template that's easy to deploy, easy to administrate, and easy to support remotely.