When Matthew Woodingss, CTO for Hot Schedules, a workforce scheduling business in Austin, Texas, faced a growing business that was taxing his data center, he turned to Dell to virtualize his servers and storage.
Woodingss with help from Dell’s Global Infrastructure Consulting Services, installed a PowerVault MD3000i iscsi storage array that attaches to several clustered highly available database servers running Microsoft SQL Server.
Hot Schedules has about 400,000 users who access their databases as many as five million times a month to find what their work schedules at restaurants might be. Because that access is 24/7 by nature, the company’s server/storage network must be highly available.
Starting a little over one year ago, Woodings consolidated 40-50 Dell PowerEdge 1750 and 1850 physical servers down to ten PowerEdge 2950’s with Microsoft’s HyperV and help from Dell.
“We knew we had to virtualize,” says Woodings. “Dell came to us and said ‘We have a project to do with Hyper-V, we’ll set it up and get you running.’ We didn’t have the knowledgebase to support VMware. With a Microsoft system, we felt the time to learn the system would be shorter.”
The company at present runs SQL Server and Exchange on their Dell-based server/storage system, which uses iSCSI.
“I love iSCSI,” says Woodings. “Using MPIO also has allowed for great bandwidth between the storage device and the host. All those things combined, we’ve seen a tremendous performance increase since putting it into production.”
Woodings’s MD3000i is configured with 15,000 RPM 300GB drives and a total capacity of 5TB.
“Obviously running a database we needed as fast as we could get,” says Woodings.
To also boost performance, Hot Schedules runs Oracle Coherence, a distributed cache that handles read-only data very well, according to Woodings.
Hot Schedules has also implemented a disaster recovery plan using DoubleTake’s real-time replication to mirror data to a location 25 miles away.
