SCIENCE

Kaminario has posted survey results from attendees of both the Microsoft SQL PASS Summit and the SC10 (Super Computing) conference, illustrating the impact slow application performance is having on businesses.

During these two November events, attendees were surveyed on a series of questions about application performance, its causes and impact. When asked about the impact slow application performance had on their businesses, 40 percent of the combined respondents named poor customer satisfaction as the number one business problem and said improving application performance would result in better customer satisfaction. A majority of those surveyed identified storage issues as the cause of poor application performance, and more than 26 percent said they needed to purchase faster storage in order to solve the problem.

Those surveyed also said employee productivity was impacted by application performance, and 25 percent said that improving application performance would result in better employee productivity.

The two groups surveyed, who come from different perspectives — software and hardware, and small, midsized and large enterprises — had the same views on the causes and impact of application performance on their businesses.

“Slow application performance can have a crippling impact on companies of any size relying on high-volume business critical applications,” said Gareth Taube, vice president of marketing for Kaminario. “Despite most organizations’ use of the latest high-performance system and network technologies, today’s storage technologies can put them behind the performance curve.”

While several things can affect application performance, 80 percent of poor application performance can be traced back to “I/O wait” as a result of disk I/O bottlenecks. I/O wait is the total time working processes are blocked while waiting for the I/O operation to complete. I/O bottleneck issues are directly linked to the type of data storage that an enterprise uses. Historically, companies have used hard disk drives for storing valuable corporate data. However, because this type of storage is mechanical in nature, it is inherently slow.

Many companies are moving to high-throughput, low-latency storage devices — such as Kaminario’s K2 DRAM storage appliance, the first extreme performance storage appliance to boost crucial applications’ performance without compromising on high availability — in order to solve the I/O bottleneck issue.

“The Kaminario K2 offers a unique combination of performance, high availability, scalability and ease of use,” said Arun Taneja, founder and consulting analyst, Taneja Group. “Every company has critical applications that could benefit from this type of approach.”

The Kaminario K2 storage appliance has been proven in real-world customer testing to deliver excellent application performance improvements. Listed here are a few accomplishments:

• A global telecommunications supplier of prepaid phone cards improved its query rates and record delivery performance by 10-25 times.
• A financial services company accelerated its business processing reengineering by 19 times and its tax liability application processing by 10 times.
• A worldwide Web-based data mining company cut its data mining processes and data delivery time in half.
• A global credit card company realized a more than twentyfold improvement in its business intelligence and data warehouse application performance.