DataCore announced that RealTime Services has deployed and
“gone live” with SANmelody for its mission-critical online transaction
processing (OLTP) application that supports payroll services for RealTime’s
clients. SANmelody supports the company’s Microsoft cluster environment, which
includes SQL database and Exchange email servers.
“I looked at LeftHand Networks, EqualLogic, HP, and others
before choosing DataCore,” said Jeff Sabotin, IT Director, RealTime Services.
“As I was looking at these offerings, I realized that you pretty much get stuck
with their box. I did not want to go with a proprietary-type hardware solution
that just pigeon-holes me by not giving me the expandability or supporting the
growth that I would like to have down the road. Who knows what the future is
going to hold?”
RealTime Services differentiates itself in supporting
personnel agencies by delivering instant pay. The direct-attached storage that
RealTime Services had was simply not fast enough to support the instant pay
service that RealTime prides itself on. Now, the SAN supports the company’s
ability to perform these instant pay transactions, which put a worker’s pay on
a pay card or on a check and includes hours worked, employee information as
well as all deductions required by law.
Scalability, upgradeability and hardware independence
RealTime Services was managing disks on multiple systems.
However, Sabotin did not like the fact that with the direct attached, storage
array approach, if he were to need more storage it would entail a complete
overhaul as well as copying the data over to the new system. He realized that a
centralized SAN server would overcome these problems and also deliver
expandability.
SANmelody supports the performance needed for the
transactions required and overcomes disk space limitations
“In a batch environment the traditional storage array
approach probably would have been fine,” said Sabotin. “However, this
application supports our growing client base and increased online usage. The
storage array was slowing down our database quite severely.” According to
Sabotin, in looking at an upgrade, the company was looking at adding more disks
or even new servers for its SQL database. What he and his team found out was
that the database itself was really the slowdown and that in terms of the email
server, the disk-to-drive sub-system accounted for the slowdown.
Sabotin realized that a DataCore SAN could fix both of the
major problems that were confronting him. “DataCore’s SANmelody could give me
speed,” he said. “It could give me expandability. It could give me more space.
And it could solve these issues for two of my main servers – my email server
and my database server.” The net impact after adding DataCore was a 6x increase
in transactions processed.
RealTime Services relies on SANmelody as a disk server that
delivers fast disk-to-disk backup and solves their disk storage issues. The
original impetus for deploying a SAN had to do with supporting business growth
and supporting the functions that the company’s software made possible – more
paychecks cut, more people online, and addressing the aforementioned speed
issue. At the same time, RealTime Services’ clients were asking for more
document imaging. They were seeking to pull up from RealTime’s system the
actual paycheck and actual invoice that was issued. The IT team knew that this
was going to grow the size of the database significantly.
A storage solution that supports the data and the systems that
run the business
RealTime Services offers a full line of services, including
accounting, taxes, payroll as well as collection services that clients can pick
from a la carte. RealTime has the software, the processes and the procedures
that solve the “payroll to billing” time gap and meet the immediate payroll
needs of small staffing firms. Interestingly at a company of thirty people,
RealTime has six full-time computer programmers that are focused on developing
and maintaining the company’s software, which is tailored to support RealTime’s
clients by offering more functions and delivering more services, particularly
in the areas of scheduling and staffing.
The company’s software amounts to an Enterprise Resource
Planning (ERP) system that has been developed over the span of eight years.
This requires a fair amount of support as it functions as a customer
relationship management (CRM) system, a payroll system, an invoicing system, a
billing system and a collection system, all-in-one. In addition, there are
numerous front-end, customer-facing web sites that are built off of the
back-end system.
The website that RealTime Services offers, which is
supported by SANmelody, provides staffers, at the various firms that are
RealTime clients, with the ability to access their paychecks and tax
information from the system via the web. The IT staff is also working on a web
site that enables clients to access their invoices and will support their
ability to pay their invoices via the web.
Using UpTempo to speed applications
Sabotin is also using DataCore’s UpTempo performance
acceleration software to speed up the disk sub-system on his computer.
According to Sabotin, “UpTempo can take a PC and make it faster; it is that
simple. Hardware manufacturers will often tout how fast their processor is.
However, they rarely tout how fast their disk sub-system is. Processors are
outpacing disks by a long shot and disks just can’t keep up because they are
probably 10-20x slower than the processor. UpTempo can make the disk sub-system
feel like it is close to equal to the processor.”
UpTempo can speed up I/O performance by 2-3x. However,
instances where I/O performance is improved by 15x is not uncommon. It depends
on how much applications are constrained by I/O bottlenecks. UpTempo's powerful
disk cache helps optimize system resource utilization by applying processor and
memory resources to the I/O bottleneck problem.
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