Reed Expositions France deploys Violin for an In-Memory infrastructure

Eighteen months after the installation of the first Violin Array, a second was added to support a new Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) and new virtual machine (VM) servers to backup the first system. Since standardising its storage infrastructure on Violin Memory Arrays, Reed Expositions France has seen operational and application performance improvements, including return on investment after 11 months and a 90 percent reduction in batch processing time for billing.

Reed Expositions France, a subsidiary of the world’s leading event organiser Reed Exhibitions, organises 60 trade and consumer events in 19 different industries each year across France. As a result, the amount of data generated by the company is growing constantly, putting a strain on data centre resources not designed with speed, efficiency and scalability in mind.

Before Reed installed its first Violin Memory Array two years ago, its SAN infrastructure, composed of two NetApp FAS2020 and one FAS2050 filer dedicated to user files services, featured no high-performance systems. Critical applications, such as the billing process running on Oracle e-business ERP, suffered from high latency and the company’s IT infrastructure was having a negative effect on its agility and competitiveness.
To address this issue, Reed Expositions France needed to accelerate the response times of its applications with higher-performance storage. Initially, Reed considered technology from Fusion-io, but the solution was not compatible with the company’s existing 32-bit IT infrastructure. When Reed tested the Violin Flash Memory Arrays, performance immediately increased by up to 30 times compared to the old system.

Less than one year later, the Violin Memory infrastructure provided return on investment by accelerating all applications and reducing the batch/query execution time of the invoicing application. Approximately 30 users in the finance team make use of this application twice a day and they saw the time needed for each batch drop decrease from two hours to 15 minutes. The department can now rely on this application more and thereby increase overall productivity.

“Violin Flash Memory Arrays have increased our ability to operate with quicker financial turnaround times by decreasing the lead time required to produce daily and monthly financial statements, said Yannick Le Bras, IT Operations Manager for Reed Expositions France. “The benefits brought to us by Violin Memory are more than fixed latency issues and sped up accounting processes; we have peace of mind that our business is running optimally.”

Steven Rose, managing director for Violin Memory EMEA, said, “It’s great to see that Reed Expositions France chose to expand its use of Violin Memory Arrays. It’s a clear indication that the technology has exceeded business expectations. Memory-based storage solutions continue to gain market share thanks to their attractive blend of performance and price, and Violin Memory is at the forefront of this growth.”