FlashSoft Case Study: Zenprise

About Zenprise

Based in Silicon Valley, Zenprise is the leading provider of mobile service management software for Blackberry, iPhone, Android and Windows Mobile phones and devices. Offering complete visibility, management and security for all types of devices, services and applications, Zenprise MobileManager is used by more than 450 companies worldwide.

FlashSoft: Software for server-tier SSD caching

FlashSoft is software that enables standard SATA, SAS and PCIe SSD memory to work as a server-tier read-write cache. FlashSoft’s Active Data Management identifies the hottest data IO, which it caches in the SSD. When hot data is cached in SSD, overall application performance is increased as IO latency is reduced. What’s more, SSD-based caching increases server capacity and storage performance, leading to a reduction in overall hardware and software costs.

Jay Gausch is Manager of Customer Relations at Zenprise. “I was initially drawn to FlashSoft because the ZenPrise Server is very IO intensive. Any technology that can improve IO on Windows Server could have a dramatic impact on the performance and efficiency of our solution.”

Testing FlashSoft with MS-SQL and Hyper-V

Gausch had two key objectives for testing FlashSoft: accelerating performance of Microsoft SQL Server and VM acceleration for Microsoft Hyper-V. Testing with SQL Server was very impressive. Zenprise Server is based on SQL Server, and it is a very IO-intensive application. Running at full capacity, the performance bottleneck for SQL Server is not the CPU; it is storage IO.

Gausch reports, “We evaluated FlashSoft’s ability to increase performance of Zenprise Server on SQLServer, using FlashSoft to create an IO cache on a 64GB SSD. In our testing, the FlashSoft-based cache increased performance by ten times. The SQL queries were very fast. It was far beyond what I’d expected.”

Next Gausch tested virtual machines running on Microsoft Hyper-V. The hardware platform was a Dell PowerEdge R200 server with a 4-core CPU and 8GB of RAM. This server, running Windows Server 2008 r2, was a test server used for QA in the company’s test lab, which Jay’s group had previously determined could support a maximum of 5 virtual machines. “Again, the bottleneck for Hyper-V on this server was not CPU, it was all due to IO limitations,” says Gausch.

To test FlashSoft with Hyper-V on the Dell PowerEdge server, Gausch’s team selected a 32GB SSD. After installing FlashSoft on the SSD, Zenprise added 8 additional VMs, for a total of 13. Says Gausch, “the performance of the thirteen VMs on the server is better than when we had only 5 VMs without FlashSoft. The VMs are readily accessible and running faster than ever before. I would put more VMs on the server, but we’ve come up against a limitation in RAM, as this particular server can only take up to 8GB of RAM. We didn’t expect this kind of increased capability from just a simple 32GB SSD. If I’d known, I would have started on a bigger server.”

Equally impressive was FlashSoft’s reliability. “Because we were experimenting on a test server, we set up a stress test running insane IO levels continuously for 24 hours. But FlashSoft had no problems at all – it never crashed, and never faltered.

“In fact, I was running meters and shims against the VMs that would trigger IO activities on the VMs. I noticed that the longer acceleration runs, the faster the VM gets. I ran Discovery every hour and Discovery went from running an average of 8-10 minutes down to 3 minutes. I configured Discovery to run every  hour over a weekend, and on Monday morning I found the performance was persistent all weekend.”

Relying on FlashSoft Today

Gausch had seen enough to be convinced. He kept FlashSoft running on the QA server, where it is still delivering high performance on more than a dozen VMs, each of which is running an instance of the Zenprise Server. “It still took me by surprise. When we’re testing Zenprise Server, it’s typical to see a write queue length around 110, and a disk read queue that’s really high, like about 7 million. Then when we turned on acceleration with FlashSoft, the disk write queue just dropped to zero, and the disk read queue was down to 300K – really a dramatic improvement. The amazing thing was that I was still just using the same 32GB SSD to accelerate a 150GB image, and FlashSoft was able to accelerate the whole disk.” Gausch continues to use FlashSoft to support the VMs today, with the same level of performance and reliability.

Recommending FlashSoft to Customers

Guasch observes, “we went to FlashSoft specifically for performance acceleration of SQL Server applications, because that’s what will have the greatest impact on the performance of our solution for our customers. We’ve spoken with customers, both large and small, and across the board, the IO bottleneck is the greatest area for performance improvement. We’ve experimented with faster drives, and tried other methods to minimize IO latency. I think FlashSoft is the best solution for reducing IO latency and increasing application performance. I’ll be recommending it to our customers.”

Gausch observes that his experience with FlashSoft isn’t specific to the Zenprise server. “Anyone running applications based on SQL Server will have the same IO bottleneck issues that I saw. Given software licenses that are tens of thousands of dollars, not to mention hardware costs, you can save a lot of money by focusing on improving IO instead of upgrading servers. I’ve seen many instances where SQL Server is doing fine at the CPU level, but IO is the bottleneck. Throwing more servers at an IO performance problem costs a lot of money and doesn’t do much for performance.”

Future Directions for FlashSoft at Zenprise

Based on the results Gausch has shown, Zenprise is considering FlashSoft to accelerate Web server performance, for Zenprise’s Web console. “I expect it to have a significant performance impact on any kind of heavily trafficked website or Web application.”

Zenprise is also considering SSD-based caching with FlashSoft as a key design requirement for its hosted and cloud architecture. “We have a requirement to support hundreds of thousands of devices for a single customer through a cloud solution, and our biggest challenge is to spec the hardware. If we include SSDs and use FlashSoft for caching, the savings in server hardware and software will be very significant.”

Conclusion: FlashSoft produces real results for Zenprise

Gausch summarizes FlashSoft’s advantages for Zenprise in terms of flexibility, performance, and overall value. “The SSD that we currently use to accelerate our test server with its thirteen VMs is not the most expensive hardware on the market. For our cloud apps, or for our larger enterprise customers, we might recommend a higher-end SSD. That’s one of the keys to getting the most value out of FlashSoft – you only have to buy the Flash hardware you need, because their software runs on whatever Flash SSD you choose.”

Gausch concludes: “Performance is our key issue, and we’ve established without a doubt that IO – not CPU – is the key bottleneck we need to address. Most of the work-arounds we have considered, such as additional servers or more powerful servers, don’t directly address the IO bottleneck as effectively as FlashSoft does. And FlashSoft is not only more effective; it’s more economical. By using FlashSoft, we aren’t buying new server hardware, or licensing additional server software. We’re simply making our existing servers and software run at their full potential.”