News Corporation - SQL Server-based Business Reporting
News Corporation is known worldwide as one of the
most dominant and demanding media and entertainment companies. It is
a highly diversified company with operations in eight industry
segments: filmed entertainment; television; cable network
programming; direct broadcast satellite television; magazines;
newspapers; book publishing; and other related enterprises.
A successful company of this scale lives or dies by
the flow of relevant data to its management. One of News
Corporations Australian News Paper divisions, News Limited Community
Newspapers' (NLCN) supports a critical business database which
required improved performance under its substantial user load. The
existing storage infrastructure (FC SAN) has been supplemented with
a high performance RamSan solid state disk to accelerate this
application.
The Challenge: Unlock User Concurrency and
Drastically Decrease Reporting Times
Some reports were taking their business reporting
application up to 25 minutes to generate, and with growth in
reporting and users, NLCN contacted their integrator, XSI Data
Solutions, who then recommended the RamSan solid state disk to
accelerate the application alongside their own Viper RAID device.
"NLCN, like many of our customers, demands that
high performance be matched with reliability and an acceptable price
point," says Fergus Gartlan of XSI. "XSI's solution included the
RamSan solid state disk because it offers all these things."
XSI's final recommendation was a single RamSan-320
directly connected to the application server via Emulex Fibre
Channel host bus adapters. The application's database totaled 230 GB
with over 150 tables. The RamSan is used to store critical data that
has high transaction volumes, while the Viper RAID supports tables
with a lower transaction rate.
The Result: Up to 56x Faster Reporting and 100
Concurrent Users
The NLCN supports between 60 to 100 concurrent
users, all of whom saw an immediate improvement in performance with
the RamSan-320 solid state disk.
Most impressively, reporting time was drastically
reduced by placing hot data on the World's Fastest Storage:
-A report that took up to 12 minutes now takes only
20 seconds.
-A report that took up to 25 minutes now takes only
40 seconds.
-A report that took up to 15 minutes now takes only
16 seconds.
That last report represents more than 56x
improvement with solid state disk!
"The RamSan-320 is consistently achieving I/O
throughput of 200MB/s, far exceeding conventional FC disk array due
to an effective total elimination of both disk seek and latency."
said Shane Rodoreda, Group IT&T Manager at News Limited
Community Newspapers. "The RamSan-320 has been so successful in
providing users with the performance they demand that an upgrade to
64GB is planned."
Contact sales@ramsan.com or request a price quote online.
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