SevOne’s Fusion-io Relationship Proves to be a Win for Both Companies
Posted by Tanya Bakalov on Tue, Nov 09, 2010
Fusion- io recently published a case study on SevOne entitled ‘SevOne Maintains Enterprise Networks with Fusion-io.’ It outlined SevOne’s challenges when needing to be able to calculate and monitor billions of performance baseline points a day, and how after testing additional RAM and other SSDs, we decided the Fusion-io ioDrive would be the best solution for our customers.
We provide customers with real-time network visibility, making it easy to find problems within their IT infrastructure before they happen. I mentioned in the case study that network performance is critical for our customers’ underlying businesses. For example, we have global trading customers that need to know what is happening this second, not last minute. Our real-time monitoring and reporting capabilities have saved our customers millions of dollars by detecting, managing, and correlating service events.
The Fusion-io case study mentions our largest appliance, the SevOne PAS 60k, that scales up to 60,000 network elements and is used for large enterprise and service provider networks. For our dynamic baselines capability, we needed to make sure that our software met the I/O 
performance requirements for calculating baselines in one appliance, which would require us to add more RAM to hold the baseline tables in memory. As an alternative, we evaluated the ioDrive for caching the baseline tables instead of holding them in RAM. Not only did the ioDrives perform like the data was in RAM, they had the advantage of not taking up a disk drive bay in our Dell appliances. The ioDrive’s non-volatile Flash also provided immediate protection against power failures without the complex redundancy schemes that RAM would have required. Finally, with the additional storage capacity on the iODrive we were able to backup additional RAM-based tables to further increase our reliability without increasing disk I/O.
When we tested the SevOne PAS 60k with the ioDrive on our most challenging customers, it worked seamlessly. This is when we knew that the ioDrive was the right fit for us.
For more on the SevOne PAS, you can contact us anytime or visit us at our main website (www.sevone.com). We also welcome you to leave a comment here too.
Tanya Shea is Senior Vice President of Operations for SevOne.