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Southern Company Case Study PDF: 80 KB (southernco.pdf) |
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"The dramatic spikes in our servers reached a more sine-wave appearance on charts, indicating the server was better able to manage its load…. {By utilizing Solid Data's SSD} we were able to avoid the cost of purchasing new servers (and the associated licensing and management costs) to redistribute the load."
Greg Sewell,
Computer Systems Analyst
Southern Company Services
Overview
With more than 42,000 megawatts of generating capacity, Atlanta-based Southern Company (NYSE: SO) is one of the largest generators of electricity in the United States. Serving both regulated and competitive markets, Southern Company participates in all phases of the electric utility business. A core component of their business relies on processing a tremendous amount of real-time data quickly and reliably to sustain competitiveness in the wholesale market.
Challenge
During a study of SQL Server performance in support of the real-time operations and trading business, Southern Company identified areas for improvement. Their servers were becoming I/O bound, forcing slow reads and writes. Further investigation revealed the primary causes appeared to be database logs and tempdb activity, data that is critical but highly transient in nature.
"We first discussed adding more spindles to the disk arrays," said Greg Sewell, Computer Systems Analyst for Southern Company. "However, we felt there had to be a way to not only gain back performance to its prior state but to also jump ahead of the curve. Our research into accomplishing this goal showed that a solid-state solution would not only help recover the servers to the original performance level but would also provide significant gains."
Solution
Southern Company implemented an SSD solution, utilizing Solid Data's SD3000. The SQL logs and tempdb data were mounted onto the SD3000, allowing these files to be accessed in real time and enabling Southern Company to exceed the three criteria that constituted SSD was a success:
"Our evaluation results were excellent," explained Greg Sewell. "Our servers realized a dramatic increase in processing capability while total processing time was cut in half. In real terms, one process originally used 5,000 rows and took 33 seconds to complete. After configuration changes and the implementation of Solid Data's SSD, the performance was so fast that we were able to increase the rows to 75,000, all of which processed in only 16 seconds."
The reduction in time-to-recover goal was easily met. The dramatic spikes in their heavily loaded SQL Server reached a more sine-wave appearance on charts, indicating the server was better able to manage its load. This made for greater server stability and smooth operation of the trading process for their customers.
Results
Southern Company's Wholesale Generation needed to find a way to address the significant performance stresses being placed on their SQL Server environment created by the growth of business and the increasing information demands of customers. After installing Solid Data's SD3000 SSD solution, their server's processing and load capabilities dramatically increased. In addition, the SSD's ability to handle peak loads virtually eliminated the processing spikes that were previously experienced by the servers, thereby significantly increasing server stability. Southern Company's Wholesale Generation group noticed an increase in performance across the board where Solid Data SSD systems were installed, and the outside companies who use data on the servers to make purchasing decisions were very satisfied with Southern Company's new performance and post-implementation reliability metrics.
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Southern Company Case Study PDF: 80 KB (southernco.pdf) |
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