Going Green with SanDisk Flash Solutions

Adapted from the SanDisk IT Blog by Kathryn Zwack

The integration of flash solutions into enterprise systems is having a broad impact on how they behave as environmental citizens.

When thinking of how your company may be working to become more green and environmentally conscious you’re likely thinking about recycling, energy consumption, carbon footprint and more efficient processes. I am likely right assuming that flash memory isn’t the first thing that comes to mind. Yet here’s a great example of how the integration of flash solutions into enterprise systems is having a broad impact on how they behave as environmental citizens.

Saving 13 billion Pages a Day with Digital Transaction Management

DocuSign would like to eliminate paper, one document at a time. The company’s mission is to empower anyone to transact anything, anytime, anywhere, on any device―securely. Through their Software-as-a-Service model, DocuSign helps their customers digitize transactions to increase security, improve accuracy, meet compliance requirements, and provide a better end-user experience—all while saving trees. DocuSign is now executing more than 13 billion pages per day—that is a lot of trees!

The Digital Revolution? Trees vs. SANs

This admirable goal was proving difficult to attain, due to the company’s three-fold annual growth. With 50,000 new unique users joining The DocuSign Global Trust Network and hundreds of thousands of users hitting its web-based application daily, the company’s SAN architecture was slowing the I/O to a crawl. Grant Peterson, Chief Technology Officer at DocuSign told us, “This rapid growth is both an asset and a challenge. We could’ve grown our SAN to meet our needs, but our data center footprint would have been outrageous. We really care about the environment and having tons of SAN HDDs replicated across our environments—burning power, rack space, and physical resources—was a nonstarter for us.”

DocuSign replaced seven production SANs with 20 Fusion ioMemory PCIe cards, moving their OLTP storage infrastructure onto the 20 cards. A a single Fusion ioMemory PCIe card could deliver more IOPS than their entire SAN infrastructure put together!

“We looked at and selected Fusion ioMemory SX300 PCIe cards because of the throughput—this ability to have hundreds of thousands of IOPS both for reading and for writing data,” said Eric Fleischman, Chief Architect and VP of Platform Engineering at DocuSign. “Where it really exceeded our expectations was in the phenomenal performance. We experienced a 47% improvement in our application’s end-to-end experience.”

Watch how DocuSign transformed their infrastructure, helped delight their customer and cut down their infrastructure footprint:

Fewer Emails Save Time and Energy

ServiceNow has an equally admirable mission—to enable people to save time through more efficient and automated processes. The company is changing the way people work through enterprise service management. Whether increasing workflow efficiency across corporate functions, simplifying support and service delivery, or automating routine processes, ServiceNow strives to eliminate employees’ dependency on email and spreadsheets that can bog down workflows and increase cost in the enterprise. The result is an enterprise that can operate more efficiently and productively than ever before: fewer emails and fewer homegrown spreadsheets equates to more time spent on key issues and decision-making.

Customers can take the ServiceNow platform and apply it to every area of their enterprise. It is this allowance for customization that brought ServiceNow to SanDisk and Fusion ioMemory. If the company had continued to build out racks the way they had in the past―using spinning disk arrays―the physical footprint of their data centers would have continued to expand at an unacceptable rate. Instead, by deploying Fusion ioMemory PCIe application accelerators, ServiceNow was not only able to scale back their data center growth, but also to reclaim 75% of the floor space that had been dedicated to spinning disk arrays. ServiceNow now operates a more environmentally-friendly data center with reduced operating costs and maintenance requirements.

“We found that Fusion ioMemory PCIe cards provided over a 5X improvement in performance on customer transactions, versus spinning disks. That means that every customer’s transactions run faster. PCIe-based flash memory is about as fast as anything that’s out there right now,” said Keith Martin, Manager of Hardware Standards and Engineering at ServiceNow. This is a second way that ServiceNow customers are reclaiming their daylight hours for more productive tasks.

Go Green!

Is your company striving to be a better environmental citizen? It’s time to include flash and your data center in the discussion.

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