CMA

Massive Oracle data warehouse performance with

XtremIO
OVERVIEW
CMA is a large service provider and developer of data warehouses for state and local
government agencies, as well as private sector enterprises. Founded in 1984, the
company has six U.S. locations with its headquarters and data center based in
Albany, NY.

CMAs specialty is taking immense data sets from many sources and creating a
complete picture of the data. This makes holistic, actionable intelligence available to
its clients, which include the health agencies and Medicaid systems of Texas, New
York State, and New York City.

ESSENTIALS
Industry
IT Services and Development
Company Size
400+ employees
Business Challenges
High data warehouse user
concurrency creates a large
random I/O workload
Limited data center space
Time to market with data
warehouse solution
High cost of Oracle licensing and
maintenance
Systems integration and data warehousing are constantly evolving, says Brian
Dougherty, CMAs chief data warehouse architect. A good track record is important,
but weve found the key is to outpace customer demands, stay ahead of the
technology curve, and partner with the best technology vendors.
BUSINESS CHALLENGES
In two of its most profitable lines of businesshosted data warehouses and packaged
data warehousesCMA was finding it increasingly difficult to achieve the fast,
predictable query and analysis response times their customers were demanding. CMA
also wanted tools to help them deliver higher value to their customers, including the
ability to execute more complex queries across larger data sets and with more user
concurrency.
Customers hammer our storage systems, says Dougherty. Most have thousands of
users reading from many terabytes of storage and running very, very large queries
concurrently. Its incredibly challenging to deliver predictable, fast response times on
those queries.

Solutions CMA uses its internal data center, a sizable environment with 15 Oracle RAC clusters,
EMC XtremIO All-Flash Array for hosting. The company also sells MicroTerabyte, a packaged Oracle RAC data
warehouse platform. For both environments, the performance target on a typical
configuration is eight gigabytes per second of I/O throughput.

As customer workloads increased over time, the only way to achieve that benchmark
was through sourcing plenty of storage arrays. The result? CMAs data center and its
packaged products continued to swell in size, with corresponding increases in cost,
power consumption, and cooling requirements, while IOPS and throughput maxed out
well below the desired performance levels.

Dougherty recognized the company was heading down an unsustainable path. He set
out to find a storage solution that could substantially boost performance and scale,
and that would match up well with new generations of faster server platforms, all in a
reduced footprint and at a much lower cost than UNIX or Mainframe solutions.

CUSTOMER PROFILE
Results
Stable, consistent performance
even with the most demanding
workloads
80% reduction in required rack
space
75% reduction in configuration
times
Reduced latency and response
times
Improved efficiency with lower
overhead, cooling costs, and
energy consumption
High scalability with no
performance degradation
SOLUTIONS
Intrigued by Flash storage as a way to increase I/O performance while reducing the
array footprint, Dougherty was also aware that Flash storage options were historically
cost-prohibitive. Thats when he learned about EMC XtremIO, an All-Flash Storage
Array from EMC.
We always believed the industry would eventually move away from spinning disks
and move toward Flash as the foundation for storage, Dougherty says. We waited to
commit until we identified a solution with the right engineering, from a reputable
company. XtremIO was the game-changing All-Flash Array we were looking for.
SMALLER FOOTPRINT EQUALS BIG SAVINGS
From Day 1, XtremIO has delivered big performance results for CMAs hosted storage
data center and for the MicroTerabyte product it packages and sells to customers.
Dougherty says he and his IT team were amazed by XtremIOs small form factor
packed with unprecedented performance, multiple data efficiency features, and
extraordinary ease of setup and use. Prior to XtremIO, a standard build-out of
MicroTerabyte traditionally resulted in a 42U rack coupled with a very large storage
array. Our previous versions of MicroTerabyte were basically the equivalent of
shipping eight refrigerators stacked end to end, Dougherty recalls. With XtremIO,
weve reduced the footprint by 80 percent. Now we can actually deliver MicroTerabyte
in a single or double 42U rack, depending on the customers requirements.
Shrinking the size of the data appliance and consolidating servers provides significant
cost savings. Floor space is very expensive for our customers, and its also expensive
for us in our own data center, says Dougherty. He adds that, by consolidating
storage, CMA has reduced Oracle licensing and maintenance costs for itself and its
clients. The reason? Low latency on XtremIO pushes CPU utilization higher, allowing
the same workload to be completed on fewer cores. This reduces the number of
Oracle core licenses required and their associated maintenance costs.
PERFORMANCE THAT SCALES
The ultra compact profile of XtremIO was a big win, but how would it perform?
The results have been astonishing, says Dougherty. We use XtremIO as a critical
component in the management and hosting of one of the largest Medicaid analytics
databases in the U.S. It gives us as much or more power than our previous storage
systems, with lower and more consistent latency and lower energy consumption.
XtremIO also provides the advantages of thin provisioning and deduplication, both of
which are important in our ability to meet client requirements."
According to Dougherty, this particular Medicaid analytics database stores 100
terabytes of information with more than 2,000 users accessing it from all over the
country. The client runs a variety of applications from reporting and ad hoc querying
to data mining and analytics along with a host of clustered platforms, including
business intelligence and metadata, which run against the Oracle RAC databases.
With XtremIO as the foundation, weve reduced latency to less than two milliseconds
end to end on large data transfers, with sustained I/O performance greater than or
equal to what weve ever been able to achieve with much, much larger disk arrays,
Dougherty explains.
With XtremIO we had 10 terabytes of data storage configured
and running in a couple of hours. That would have taken us days
with other storage arrays.
Brian Dougherty
Chief Data Warehouse Architect, CMA

The scalability of XtremIO has also been a major plus for CMA. With one X-Brick,
which is the basic building block of an XtremIO array, CMA is achieving over two
gigabytes per second of sustained I/O throughput on sequential reads. By scaling out
to four X-Bricks, the company is able to get more than eight gigabytes of throughput
with end-to-end latency of two milliseconds or less reported by Oracle on large block
reads.

With each X-Brick we add, were achieving linear performance, meaning the I/O
bandwidth and capacity doubles while the latency remains consistently fast, says
Dougherty. XtremIO was the only array on the market that would meet our
scalability requirements.

CONFIGURATION TIMES CUT BY 75 PERCENT

While the combination of performance, form factor, and scalability were what initially
drew CMA to XtremIO, the arrays ease of configuration was one of the most
surprising and beneficial attributes.

We typically spend about a week setting up and tuning many different vendors
storage arrays in our data centers and with our MicroTerabyte products," says
Dougherty. With XtremIO we had 10 terabytes of storage configured and up
and running in a couple of hours. This would have taken us days with other
storage arrays.

Dougherty also points out that many of CMAs clients and prospects are government
entities, whose first priority is ensuring that tax dollars are spent on IT solutions that
deliver high-performance experiences to employees and citizens. By slashing the
configuration and setup times by 75 percent with XtremIO, CMA is able to bring a
better product to the market faster and at a lower price, passing those savings on
to its clients.

THE CLEAR CHOICE FOR FLASH STORAGE

As CMAs chief warehouse architect, Dougherty is always on the lookout for
technologies that will advance the business. Although he evaluated other storage
arrays, including Oracle Exadata and HP 3PAR StoreServ, Dougherty said no other
storage platform could match the performance, small footprint, and scalability of
XtremIO.

There are a lot of Flash arrays out there, but they are Flash in name only,
Dougherty says. Weve found most of those vendors simply substituted Flash in an
existing storage design. They are not engineered from the ground up to be an All-
Flash array the way XtremIO is.
 TACKLING BIG DATA WITH XTREMIO
Having seen XtremIO transform CMAs data warehousing products and services,
Dougherty is excited at the prospect of a future with more Flash. CMA is developing a
next-generation version of its MicroTerabyte appliance designed for big data.
Were excited about the addition of a big data analytics platform to our
MicroTerabyte product line, says Dougherty. We see XtremIO, with its form factor
and Flash performance, as a key driver of that solutions value. It will allow us to get
to the next level, up to the petabyte scale, in the size of the databases we support.

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property of their respective owners. Copyright 2013 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved.
Published in the USA. 09/13 Customer Profile H12344

EMC believes the information in this document is accurate as of its publication date. The
information is subject to change without notice.