Danbury, Connecticut-based Odyssey Logistics provides trend planning, audits, freight bill payments, tracking and management to its vertical chemical industry customer base from the Odyssey North Carolina data center. Odyssey's challenge was meeting the expectations of its customers as a software as a service (SaaS) provider, especially during peak load times for its Oracle database.
"We were running Oracle as our production database with about 100 Red Hat Linux and Wintel servers," said Eric Brown, Odyssey's database administrator. "We had a large VMware infrastructure, and we were using hard drive (HDD) storage." Odyssey began to see problems occurring at times of peak loads, such as transaction performance slowdowns because of the heavy workloads, and also a slowing of response time for customer end users on the Odyssey Web portal.
"To solve this, we knew we wanted to go to solid state disk (SSD) technology for the performance we were looking for, but there were many options in the market," said Odyssey's CIO, Brad Massey. "We wanted a solution that would continue to run our operations consistently well on a daily basis, but we also needed a solution that would be "burstable" when it came to handling large batches of orders that our customers could submit to our system simultaneously."
Odyssey eventually selected Texas Memory Systems' RamSan 400 and 500 products to run the Odyssey production database on SSD. The company penciled out a TCO that justified the SSD technology investment.
"We looked at the cost of the additional hard drive spindles we would have to purchase if we stayed with hard drive technology," said Brown, "And we found that the cost to move to solid state drives was not that much different, since fewer SSD drives are required to give us the performance we wanted. From a database perspective, the decision simplified my job, because with a hard drive solution I had to spread the data over many enclosures of disk. Easily, we would have had to purchase 100 additional spindles of hard disk to achieve the performance levels that we wanted, so it was easy to look at the cost and make the decision to go to SSD."
