Violin Memory and Stream Financial set record performance in benchmark

Violin Memory®, Inc. and Stream Financial have announced the results of a recent performance benchmark test. The test, which demonstrated unprecedented results for processing and aggregating more than one trillion rows of risk data, contained 13 trillion risk data points. The test revealed that Stream Financial’s DataFusion platform was able to compress more than 100TB of data down to 9TB, using Violin’s Windows Flash Array (WFA) storage environment, in just 4 hours and 19 minutes.

One of the many business challenges facing executive management in large organisations is the inability to generate timely, accurate reports to support decision-making. Report processing, which typically includes aggregating and grouping granular transaction level data across an enterprise, can sometimes take days. These benchmark test results address the on-going challenges of getting access to real-time data.

The performance benchmark test, completed by The Test People, was designed to simulate a ‘real-world’ trading environment with risk data containing risk buckets for delta, gamma, vega and theta for trading books over a 12-year period. The data was comprised of 13 trillion fields or one trillion rows of bucketed risk data at trade level. To simulate a typical business view, the data was aggregated using SQL ‘where’, ‘like’ and ‘group by’ queries to show bucketed risk exposure by risk type, currency and counterparty.

The purpose of the benchmark test was to demonstrate how Stream’s DataFusion platform, running on Violin’s Windows Flash Array, enables large-scale aggregation of risk data at record speed on an industry standard, mid-range server.

Moving from an original storage environment of direct-attached storage with SSDs, the benchmark test environment had the Stream DataFusion platform and Violin 32-bit WFA interfacing with a single Intel Xeon CPU E5-2690 v2 @3.00GHZ server. The entire process took just 4 hours and 19 minutes; with test results indicating that process time could be reduced further by scaling the servers and arrays. The ability to perform very fast I/O at this scale with highly random low latency access makes this solution far superior to legacy storage solutions. It would require a vast investment in physical infrastructure to achieve a comparable result.

Stephen Taylor, CEO of Stream Financial, commented, “We are very pleased with these benchmark results which demonstrate the performance, resilience and throughput that can be achieved using Stream Financial’s DataFusion technology in combination with Violin all-flash arrays. This performance clearly shows the type of data senior executives will get access to for near real-time management information whilst retaining transparency at the transaction level.”

Tony King, UK Country Manager at Violin Memory, added, “Violin’s all-flash arrays are designed for very high performance solutions, the Stream Financial example is one such application, while delivering unmatched resiliency, availability, and application cost benefit. We are very excited about the opportunity to offer the marketplace the combination of Stream Financial’s DataFusion platform and Violin’s all-flash array.”

Performance engineering and testing specialists, The Test People, validated the test results. Technical Director Ash Gawthorp said, “This is a fantastic result, especially considering the complexity of the queries executed, the relative commodity nature of the servers involved and the fact that the performance bottlenecks are with the servers not the memory arrays. We look forward to improving on these results in the future.”