In the process of completing an online survey, milliseconds can make a world of difference when it comes to panelists moving from one page to another. After swapping from hard disk to Pure's flash storage technology, YouGov saw an improvement of 200ms per click. Overall, surveys are up to 80 per cent faster, ensuring more engagement and with the knowledge that they will no longer abandoned due to a slow system.
"We had a big issue where the database became slower and slower as the times to click went up,” said Nick Carter, Head of Infrastructure and System Operations at YouGov. “Panellists’ times would go from 500ms to one, two or three seconds, and at that point they would stop completing questionnaires and just give up.” With spinning disks too slow to handle the transaction, the switch to flash has eliminated the issue.
Based on the scale of YouGov's operations, faster transaction times can make a considerable difference. Before the 2015 General Election, YouGov polled 30,000 people at seven-day intervals to understand their voting intentions and track changes in sentiment. Such a workload places huge importance on reliability and performance.
Peter Gadd, Pure Storage’s Director of Northern EMEA, said, "We’ve helped YouGov accelerate access to information and speed up the decision making process. YouGov’s systems are performing much more quickly - surveys are 80 per cent faster, database transactions are four times faster, and download times have halved. It means panellist experiences are smooth and uninterrupted.
“Before installing the Pure Storage Flash Array, storage took up 29 per cent of the total processing time. During the proof of concept, YouGov reduced this to 1 per cent. We improved YouGov’s ability to get data ready for external communication more quickly, beating its competition to market and improving its ability to win business.”
Recommended to YouGov by IT infrastructure provider Softcat, Pure’s FlashArray technology is capable of processing data at the speed needed to generate the timely insight YouGov is known for.
Tim Jeans, Datacentre Sales Manager at Softcat, said: "Our staff work incredibly hard to agnostically advise Softcat’s customers in relation to the plethora of options available to them, particularly when it comes to storage. We were delighted to connect YouGov with Pure Storage's FlashArray, which provides density, ease of management for enterprise functionality, performance – whilst maintaining affordability.”
YouGov’s mission is built on the premise that the more people are able to participate in the decisions made by the institutions that serve them, the better these decisions will be. Institutions come to YouGov to find out more about the beliefs, behaviours and brand opinions of the people they serve via online surveys. Recently the Pew Research Centre published a study the accuracy of online non-probability panels, in which YouGov came top.
