The Challenge

With over 400 employees distributed across branches in 13 states, Starkey Mortgage’s IT staff has its work cut out, but Chief Information Officer Bill Burke has always looked at such challenges as an opportunity instead of a hurdle. Bill told us, “Starkey Mortgage has long viewed IT as a way to gain competitive advantage instead of being a black hole of infrastructure spending.”

One way Bill’s IT team has accomplished this is by virtualizing its entire end-user experience with Citrix XenApp. “In 2007, we moved from a physical server environment to a VMware-backed Citrix XenApp environment,” Bill explained. “This greatly reduced our IT staff’s workloads, reduced the cost of workstations, and even reduced workstation power consumption because fewer apps were running on them and required less RAM.”

But as the size of Starkey Mortgage’s workforce grew, performance became a problem. Bill said, “As we added employees, our SAN began to struggle during peak traffic times. Security and compliance auditing tasks added to the VM performance workload. We knew that I/O was the bottleneck, so our engineering team began looking for the best solution.”

The Solution

Starkey Mortgage’s engineering team evaluated several solid-state technologies and, after meeting with some Fusion-io representatives, determined that Fusion’s ioDrives were the best solution.

Bill said, “We looked at some flash solutions that would improve SAN performance, but these solutions would have required additional investment in network infrastructure and increased our system’s complexity and power requirements. Fusion’s approach of putting data in the server just made more sense.”

Benchmarking

The first thing Bill’s team did was to baseline the performance of the storage systems. He looked at the performance of his SAN storage for a 60-day period prior to installing Fusion-io and then compared the performance for the ensuing 60-days. The results are shown below.

Powering Productivity and Positive End-user Experience 

Bill’s tests show that the majority of the read requests are now being serviced from Fusion’s ioDrive. This provides a dramatic improvement in the latency of the system, reducing it by over four times. This increased the CPU utilization by more than double, going from around 12 percent utilization to around 30 percent sustained utilization.

The true test came when Bill’s team deployed and gathered feedback from application users. The combination of high IOPS with the ioDrives’ industry-leading low latency delivered a user experience that far surpassed Bill’s expectations.

“We first deployed the system to our power-users and asked them for honest critiques,” said Bill. “The results were much better than we’d anticipated. One user told us, ‘The performance is fantastic, wonderful, marvelous.’” 

Help for the Help Desk

Another benefit of a better user experience has been the improved nature of performance-related complaints to the help desk.

Brian Klesc, Lead Network Engineer, told us, “Before we had Fusion-io, Windows would page idle applications and services to disk. Users returning to a paged application would find it slow to load or even disconnected from Citrix entirely. These types of complaints are less common now. Life has never been better on the helpdesk since Fusion-io came on the scene.  The significant and immediate improvements have been noticed throughout the company.”

Boot Storms Eliminated 

Starkey tested several XenApp servers with 92 concurrent users on a single ESXi server, with the following results:

• No boot storms. Even with 92 users accessing the server at the same time, desktops instantiate as soon as users log on.
• Virtually eliminated write latency. Even peak loads of 87,000 write requests produces no measurable latency.
• Ultra-fast reads. The rapid write request service eliminated resultant read queues, greatly improving read performance. The Fusion Powered server achieved a satisfying excess of 90,000 read requests in 4 milliseconds.

“At first I thought we had made a mistake somewhere in our testing, since we had never seen 0 latency before. I actually asked one of the engineers to take a second look and verify that we were truly seeing no latency even during peak demands.”

Enhancing End-to-end Efficiency

In addition to improving performance, the ioDrives allowed Bill’s team to improve the end-to-end efficiency of Starkey Mortgage’s entire VDI infrastructure. Implementing ioDrives allowed Bill’s team to increase its VDI performance profile without adding infrastructure or increasing system complexity.

“Moving the XenApp applications onto ioDrives in the ESX servers greatly improved the speed at which XenApp served applications without adding more servers,” Bill said. “It also reduced the I/O burden on our SAN, so our databases could run faster while maintaining our HA profile. Additionally, it reduced the amount of data going over our network, giving us room to grow there as well. In essence, we significantly scaled performance without scaling maintenance and energy costs.”

System Overview

Virtualization server specs:

• 4 servers, quad core Intel Xeon X7560 processor, 256GB RAM
• OS: VMware ESXi 4.1
• Applications: Citrix XenApp
• ioDrive Duo 640GB MLC

Summary

Implementing ioDrives in their Citrix XenApp environment gave Starkey Mortgage the following benefits:

• Faster application performance for better user experience and increased productivity
• Reduced performance-related help desk tickets
• Improved performance without increasing maintenance, power, and cooling costs
• Reduced burden on SAN and extended SAN investment
• Reduced network traffic to extend network investment

Bill is very happy with the performance the ioDrives delivered to Starkey Mortgage’s VDI system and is now targeting other areas where Fusion-io solutions can improve performance without scaling infrastructure.

About the Company

Starkey Mortgage (WR Starkey Mortgage LLP, NMLSR #2146) is a privately held mortgage banking company headquartered in Plano, Texas. The company has offices in Texas, Colorado, Arkansas, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama and Oklahoma. Starkey Mortgage is consistently ranked in the top 30 companies in the U.S. for mortgage originations with a retail only presence. With over a decade of commitment to establishing and maintaining relationships, Starkey Mortgage differentiates itself by fostering a corporate environment where people truly come first.