VeloBit Accelerates Application Performance by 20x at Masergy Communications

Summary

Company: Masergy

Industry: Telecommunications

Business Challenge: Real-time network performance analysis

Technical Environment:

Proprietary network analysis application

Data size: 2.5 TB

Hardware: Scale-out cluster of 16 Dell R610 servers

~100 GB RAM / server

HDD: 4 x 900 GB SAS (10K RPM) / server

SSD: 400 GB OCZ Deneva2 R series

Results:

20x increase in application performance (reduced processing time from 2 minutes to 6 seconds)

10x data compression

Non-disruptive installation, transparent to applications and storage infrastructure

Background

Masergy Communications provides managed, secure, global network services to enterprises that have complex needs across multiple locations. The Marergy Communications network and software solutions enable clients to seamlessly deploy and manage IT applications such as video, voice and data, on a global basis. Intelligent Network Analyst, Masergy's cloud-based network performance monitoring tool is a crown jewel in the company’s portfolio. Intelligent Network Analyst monitors network performance in real-time, correlates all traffic (voice, video, application data, etc.) to Quality of Service (QoS), and enables real-time network provisioning, bandwidth changes and reporting. The solution gathers and analyzes terabytes of data at the speed of gigabytes per second.

Technical Challenge

Masergy’s system produces large amounts of data, snapshots of which are analyzed in real-time. Few technologies can keep up with the heavy IOPS (Input/Output Operations Per Second) load generated by the computationally- intensive analytics application. Masergy Communications has deployed a high-performance scale-out server cluster with distributed storage. While the configuration of the specific servers deployed varies, a representative example of a server includes Dell R610, with 2x Intel X5650 processors, 100 GB of RAM, and 400 GB OCZ Deneva2 R series SSD.

As Masergy’s customer base expanded and traffic rates increased, the incoming data stream doubled and tripled. The engineering team had to find a way to further scale I/O performance. Adding new hardware was not a viable option because of cost constraints, so the engineering team evaluated multiple options to accelerate the existing hardware. Options Masergy’s engineers evaluated included a RAM caching solution (memcached), multiple SSD caching solutions, and re-writing the application to incorporate aspects of caching. VeloBit HyperCache proved to be the easiest to deploy and offered the highest performance of all solutions Masergy Communications evaluated.

How VeloBit Helped

VeloBit HyperCache installed non-disruptively on the 16 servers that host the Masergy Communications analytics application. VeloBit compressed cached data by 10x, which increased the effective cache size. As a result more data could be served from cache, which increased application performance and lowered the I/O load to primary storage. VeloBit combined RAM caching and SSD caching in one solution, thus utilizing all available hardware resources. Sample application processing times were reduced from 2 minutes to 6 seconds, a 20 times increase in application performance.

“We evaluated multiple options to accelerate our application and VeloBit proved superior to all alternatives,” said Kirby Files, Software Architect at Masergy Communications. “VeloBit increased application performance by 20x, significantly more than the alternative solutions we evaluated. VeloBit compressed data by 10x, which reduced the amount of storage we needed for caching and reduced the I/O load to our primary storage. Also, since VeloBit is a plug & play all-software solution, we did not have to make any changes to our application or hardware, which saved us months of development effort. VeloBit is an ideal solution for anyone with I/O intensive applications.”