Netflix Selects Imperial SSD Accelerators for Application
Speed Up
20 Times Faster Performance than Disk
El
Segundo, Calif., July 07, 2003
– Imperial
Technology, the company accelerating application
performance,
announced today that Netflix (Nasdaq: NLFX) the worlds
largest online movie rental service, selected dual
Imperial SANaccelerators to speed up its fulfillment
application.
“With
over 1 million customers requesting titles, we manage a
very large fulfillment activity and have built a
responsive IT infrastructure around meeting or exceeding
customer requirements,” says Ganesh Raghavan, IT
Manager for Systems & Database.
"Order generation is one of the time
sensitive processes for us as we need to ensure it’s
complete within
a certain time frame to
allow the fulfillment centers to pack and ship DVD
orders.”
Launched
in 1998, Netflix is the world's largest online movie
rental service, providing more than one million
subscribers with access to a comprehensive library of
more than 15,000 DVD titles. For $19.95 a month, Netflix
subscribers can rent as many DVDs as they want, with
three movies out at a time, and keep them for as long as
they like. There are no due dates and no late fees. DVDs
are delivered directly to the subscriber's address by
first-class mail from shipping centers throughout the
United States. Netflix can reach more than 60 percent of
its subscribers with generally next-day delivery. The
company also provides background information on DVD
releases, including critic reviews, member reviews and
ratings and personalized movie recommendations.
“Every customer order generates multiple
database inquiries which makes the customer rental queue
table, or list of movies the customer is waiting for, a
critical one that requires high I/O rates,” said
Ganesh. “We
tested an 18GB Imperial SANaccelerator and found that
the table I/O access averaged 1 millisecond compared to
20 milliseconds on our current storage array.
As a result of the SANaccelerator, the order
processing application which uses an Oracle 8i database,
ran 25% faster.”
Netflix subsequently deployed the SANaccelerator
in a switched fabric SAN using 2Gbps switches.
The primary application server that addresses the
SANaccelerator is a Sun E4500.
The SANaccelerator helped Netflix continue to run its
business while it looked more closely at upgrading its
application. “I
believe the SANaccelerator could have provided even more
performance improvement but we ran into another
infrastructure bottleneck.
We’ve since rewritten the order generation
application and its now resident in memory but the movie
files still run on the SANaccelerator,” adds Ganesh.
Imperial’s SANaccelerator systems eliminate I/O
bottlenecks in SANs by providing access to data hundreds
of times faster than conventional rotating disk drives.
The devices act as superchargers for application
performance, increasing the transfer rate for the small
block transfers commonly seen in database environments
without the expense of rewriting applications or
upgrading to faster servers. The systems are easily
partitioned and managed through SANaccess, Imperial’s
LUN Masking solution, to take advantage of SAN-based
storage virtualization or heterogeneous host
connectivity.
About Imperial Technology Inc.
Headquartered
in El Segundo, Calif., Imperial Technology has over
twenty five years experience delivering
high-performance, zero latency solid state storage
solutions. Imperial’s
MegaRam and SANaccelerator solutions are installed on
Sun, HP, IBM, and Unisys systems and integrate
seamlessly in environments that run Oracle (NASDAQ:
ORCL), Sybase (NASDAQ: SYBS), Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT),
Veritas (NASDAQ: VRTS) and EMC (NYSE: EMC) products.
Imperial Technology can be reached online at www.imperialtechnology.com.
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