Case Study: Skills Inc achieves 75% faster reporting and fewer points of failure with SanDisk DAS Cache (ioMemory)

Skills Inc. Provides Services And Skills To The Aerospace Industry With The Help Of Dell And Sandisk Das Cache

Skills Inc. is a Washington State nonprofit social enterprise and one of the region’s largest aerospace suppliers, employing 650 people—60% of whom self-identify as having disabilities—to provide manufacturing, finishing, technical services, and business solutions. The company relied on an Infor VISUAL ERP running on Microsoft SQL Server for critical reporting and analytics, but massive tables and slow queries (some over 660,000 work orders) — plus a shared SAN that caused I/O bottlenecks and multiple points of failure — left essential reports and nightly Utility Costing runs locking the database and taking hours.

Skills Inc. moved to server-local acceleration by deploying Dell PowerEdge R730xd servers with SanDisk Fusion ioMemory PCIe cards and SanDisk Cache DAS, using SQL Server AlwaysOn read-only secondaries for reporting. The change was easy to implement and delivered major gains: Utility Costing runs dropped from 60.5 minutes to 15.25 minutes (a 75% improvement), writes accelerated by about 94% and reads by 43%, maintenance became easier, and points of failure were reduced so reporting can run as part of standard operations without disrupting the primary database.

Skills Inc

Ed Hammond

Senior Systems Administrator