Slumberland

	RDBMS: Oracle Application: OLTP, Batch Processing, Decision Support Hardware: Data General Aviion 9500 Solid Data Solution: 800 Solid-State Disk

"The Solid Data solid-state disk provides disk I/O access which is four to 20 times faster than our RAID 5 disk array."

Mark Lacher,
Senior Systems Analyst
Slumberland

Overview
Slumberland needed to dramatically improve the performance of their sales and inventory database. The Oracle database was running on a Data General Aviion 9500 with an 18 GB RAID 5 disk array. The system had overall performance problems. In particular, running batch jobs caused a slowdown in online transaction processing which infringed on the company's ability to accomplish inventory control, point-of-sale, and accounting functions. This also negatively impacted customer satisfaction, threatening future revenue from repeat business and customer references.

Mark Lacher, senior systems analyst, was concerned because it appeared that what he needed was an expensive computer system upgrade. According to Lacher, "We were running out of CPU, memory, and disk I/O depending on the applications that were running. When we ran batch jobs, our disks would get very busy and cause our online transactions to really start slowing down. We didn't want to incur the expense of a CPU upgrade, so we started looking for a solution that had faster disk I/O and would allow us to process our information faster."

By installing the Solid Data 800 Solid-State Disk, Lacher was able to increase disk I/O transfer rates, dramatically improving the performance of transaction processing and complex queries. Disk I/Os increased from 60 per second with disks 100% busy to 400 per second with disks just 30% busy, leaving plenty of room for additional performance gains.

"The Solid Data solid-state disk provides disk I/O access which is four to 20 times faster than our RAID 5 disk array," Lacher said. "This is extremely important because we run a tremendous amount of batch reports that soak up disk I/O. Solid Data allows us to simultaneously run batch reports, OLTP, and decision support queries while improving overall performance."

Summary
Slumberland needed to dramatically improve the performance of their sales and inventory database. Due to slow disk I/O transfer rates, running batch jobs was causing a slowdown in online transaction processing. This negatively impacted the company's ability to accomplish inventory control, point-of-sale, and accounting functions. It also threatened customer satisfaction and future revenue from repeat business and customer references. The company did not want to incur the expense of a CPU upgrade, so they looked for another solution that could increase I/O performance. The Solid Data 800 Solid-State Disk increased disk I/Os per second from 60 to 400. The performance improvement was four to 20 times faster than the company's RAID 5 disk array and the system had room for additional performance gains.

Slumberland Case Study PDF: 16 KB (slumberland.pdf)