New Jersey-based inVentiv Health, Inc. is a global provider of value-added services to the pharmaceutical, life sciences and healthcare industries with over $800 million in revenue and 5,200 employees.
inVentiv Health’s mission critical application, SAS (Statistical Analysis System), suffered poor performance running on a virtualized Citrix XenApp 6 housed on a VMware ESX environment. “We had the application running on our traditional hard disk drive Fibre Channel storage array, but we had endless user complaints and we were fielding consistent calls and having to reboot the servers,” noted Tony Marando, manager of technical services at inVentiv Health. “We also experienced extremely long delays when conducting statistical analysis of data sets; what should have been a simple task was taking over 4 hours.”
THE SOLUTION
inVentiv Health decided to look for a more appropriate storage solution. “We needed a way to really increase the underlying performance without breaking the bank – we just didn’t have the budget to keep buying more and more slow storage. WHIPTAIL was the perfect answer to our problem: a high-performing storage array that captures the speed of solid-state, but at a cost point that we could get on board with,” said Marando. “It’s about what we are paying per IO, not per GIG anymore–particularly for our more intensive applications.”
THE RESULT
A FASTER VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENT
“After deploying WHIPTAIL’s silicon storage solution we have found our virtual environment is running 4X faster
and the help desk calls have stopped completely,” stated Marando. “Those reports that took hours now only take minutes…. The 10X increase in improved performance offers us a distinct competitive advantage.” “WHIPTAIL’s underlying flash-based architecture shows tremendous performance. We were able to stop overprovisioning in spindles (while wasting capacity) to try to optimize the underlying storage,” added Marando.
HIGHLIGHTS
• Virtual environment running 4X faster with WHIPTAIL’s silicon storage
• Improved performance gives competitive advantage
• Statistical Analysis System performance optimized
• Dramatic decrease in help desk calls and user complaints
