AT Internet Accelerates Analytics Six Times on 1/6th the Servers

Posted: 18 Jul 2012

AT Internet is a leading independent web, mobile, and social analytics solution provider in Europe—its expertise in the field of online intelligence enables it to measure web traffic, Internet user behavior, and performance and availability of websites.

“For the past three years, we have offered customers real-time statistics on website usage,” Thomas Fisher, AT Internet Technical Architect, explained. “As our customer base grew, it became harder and harder for our SQL Server database to meet this SLA. We were up to 12 database servers and needed to find a more affordable and scalable solution.”

To achieve more performance with less scale-out, Thomas moved AT Internet’s most active databases onto Fusion ioDrives, while keeping the tempDB on local disks and the cooler databases on a SATA disk array. The results spoke for themselves:

Thomas said, “The ioDrive-based servers achieve this performance without any noticeable queuing, which insulates us against traffic spikes. I estimate the ioDrive performance has reduced database request times by 6x.”

Not only did Thomas and his team improve the performance of AT Internet’s Microsoft SQL Server database, but they did so with only one-sixth the servers. The ROI was clear.

“We considered purchasing a SAN, but it would have taken more than 100 disks, plus we would have had to install a Fibre Channel system and Fibre Channel cards just to meet our needs,” said Thomas. “It only took two servers with a single ioDrive in each to give us six times the performance we had before.”

Interested in the finer details of how AT Internet boosted performance without scale-out, all while cutting costs? Read the case study.