The Allant Group Achieves 10x Improvement in Oracle Database Performance with Nimbus Flash Memory Systems

SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., June 25, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Nimbus Data Systems, Inc., the leader in Sustainable Storage® and intelligent flash memory-based storage systems, today announced that The Allant Group, a leading provider of marketing analytics solutions, has selected the award-winning Nimbus S-Class flash memory platform to power its business-critical Oracle databases. Compared with its existing high-end 150-spindle disk array, the Nimbus S-Class delivered up to 10 times greater transaction performance, accelerating processing jobs and alleviating IO bottlenecks that had previously forced database administrators to drop and rebuild indexes frequently.  Furthermore, the efficiency of the Nimbus flash technology simplified The Allant Group's datacenter operations, freeing rack space, cooling resources, and energy to support future growth.

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"The introduction of Nimbus S-Class dramatically improved our Oracle database performance and eliminated tedious workarounds that previously consumed a significant amount of valuable DBA time and energy," said Dan Otterness, Enterprise Infrastructure Architect of The Allant Group. "Most impressive is watching the affordable, compact and easy-to-use Nimbus system outgunning our vastly larger and energy hungry 15K disk array by 10 times. We view Nimbus' flash technology as a significant enhancement to the success of our Oracle environment and see this as disruptive technology for such transactional workloads."

According to Gartner, Oracle's database revenue grew 28% in Q4 of 2011 and 26% so far this year, accounting for 34% of its revenue, but maximizing database performance is a serious challenge. High-performance, low-latency storage is essential in online transaction processing (OLTP) workloads. Reducing latency increases transactions per second, which in turn accelerates business operations and boosts profitability. While some database users have turned to proprietary database appliances, costly cache-heavy disk arrays, or complex storage techniques like short-stroking, users like The Allant Group have discovered a less expensive and simpler approach – moving away from spinning disk arrays to flash memory technology for all database storage. Unlike tiering, an all-flash storage system delivers consistently low latency while reducing operating expenses by 80% compared to disk arrays.

"As IT environments continue to scale in both size and complexity, we see application owners with an increasing need for more performance to handle business critical databases," said Gene Ruth, Research Director at Gartner. "All-flash solutions architected like this enable flexibility for Oracle administrators while delivering increased performance and efficiencies that competing solutions simply cannot. Flash technology is empowering customers to meet the challenging requirement to improve processes in today's high performance applications while shrinking the datacenter footprint dramatically."

"We are delighted to support The Allant Group's next-generation Oracle infrastructure," stated Thomas Isakovich, CEO of Nimbus Data Systems. "DBA's have long struggled with disk arrays, going through all sorts of configuration complexity in hopes of reducing latency by a millisecond or two. As this win demonstrates, organizations that deploy Nimbus flash memory systems can eliminate decades of disk array tuning challenges and supercharge database performance, increasing revenue opportunities and improving quality of service."

About The Allant Group

For 28 years, Allant has been consistently delivering innovative marketing performance improvements to clients through integrated cross channel marketing solutions driven by best in class data, analytic, technology, strategy and measurement capabilities. Evolving beyond Marketing Optimization to Audience Optimization solutions, Allant delivers customer intelligence across all addressable channels to produce maximum yield for every marketing / advertising dollar invested. For more information on Allant and its products, services and solutions, call 800.367.7311 or visit Allant online at www.allantgroup.com.

About Nimbus Data Systems

Nimbus develops award-winning Sustainable Storage® systems, the most intelligent, efficient and fault-tolerant solid state storage platform engineered for server and desktop virtualization, databases, HPC, and next-generation cloud infrastructure. Combining low-latency flash memory hardware, comprehensive data management and protection software, and highly-scalable multiprotocol storage features, Nimbus systems deliver dramatically greater performance at a significantly lower operating cost than conventional disk-based primary storage arrays, all at a comparable acquisition cost. For more information, visit www.nimbusdata.com, or follow Nimbus at twitter.com/nimbusdata.

SOURCE Nimbus Data Systems, Inc.