RAID Jump-Starts HP 9000's Data-Writing Performance By 600%

Rapid growth and heavy demand from internal users was creating a data bottleneck for Jonathan Everett at CRA Managed Care in Boston, MA. Everett is the system administrator for its computer system and manages an Oracle Database on model HP 9000. CRA Managed Care employs 3,200 employees and posted annual sales of $220 million dollars in 1997. The company was founded in 1978.

Storage Requirements Expand With Company
Performance continues to be the driving factor in development of quality computer resources for internal personnel. To meet performance demands and manage individual needs with the constraints of hardware budgets, Everett had previously turned to SEEK for answers. "I originally purchased an S-451 RAID system one year ago from SEEK because it beat other products we were evaluating in pricing and performance tests. Since then, our database needs have grown and even the S-451 can't keep up with our data-hungry Oracle database," states Everett.

Everett noted that internal users were having wait times climb to over one minute for some crucial programs - which was unacceptable. With imminent growth on the horizon, decisions needed to be made to solve this problem. "CRA purchased four companies in 1996, which translated into explosive growth of the database," comments Everett.

He adds, "We have been running the Oracle Financials on a dual processor HP 9000 K220. Users began calling the IT Group daily, complaining that the system was too slow for them to get their work done. At that time, SEEK recommended I purchase the Xcelerator configured with 8 GB of mirrored disk and 256 MB of cache. The Xcelerator improved read times by 500% and write times by 600% over the S-451 RAID."

System Administrator To Put Entire Database On RAID
"Originally, I had just planned to place the hottest files on the Xcelerator, but now that the hot files are being serviced so quickly, other less-hot files are proving to be bottlenecks," says Everett. With this in mind, and the fact that their billing being transferred to this system next month, Everett plans to place the entire database into Xcelerator technology. CRA purchased an Adaptive RAID system configured with 12 GB of disk for this task. Performance jumps with the Xcelerator and Adaptive RAID are making CRA workers more productive.