Case Study: Alvernia University achieves doubled Blackboard LMS performance and zero timeouts with Condusiv Technologies' V-locity I/O reduction software

University Doubles Performance of SQL Application with V-locity I/O Reduction Software

Alvernia University, a private university in Reading, PA with about 3,000 students and 500 faculty, was seeing serious performance problems with its Blackboard LMS running on an SQL backend (EMC VNX 5300). After virtualizing Windows servers the IT team encountered the “I/O blender” effect—slow, random I/O causing timeouts for students, frequent helpdesk tickets and monthly server reboots; a 10GbE upgrade didn’t help and a costly flash hardware refresh was being considered.

The IT team deployed Condusiv’s V-locity I/O reduction software on Windows VMs to optimize and cache I/O at the source. The result: LMS performance more than doubled (response times fell from 55 ms to 5 ms), a 75% cache hit rate, throughput doubled (1 GB processed in 1.5 min vs. 2.9 min), complaints and timeouts dropped to zero, monthly reboots stopped, and the university avoided an expensive forklift hardware upgrade while gaining confidence to virtualize more SQL servers.

Alvernia University

Rich Reitenauer

Manager of Infrastructure Management and Support, Alvernia University