Travel

TUI Student Travel saves on virtual storage with Diskeeper : TUI Student Travel has made enormous savings on storage hardware thanks to its use of V-locity virtual platform disk optimizer. Diskeeper V-locity virtual platform disk optimizer improves performance and reduces I/O response time. The global student travel firm’s application of V-locity has enabled it to put its 200+ Hyper-V servers on lower-cost and lower-end drives, significantly improving performance as the disks are so optimized. TUI Student Travel offers a wide range of travel experiences ranging from educational tours for school groups to vacations for students on a study break, and serves more than two million holiday-makers every year.

Improve virtual storage for optimized digital workflow

“We process significant numbers in credit card transactions every day, so our systems have to be reliable,” explained Michael Novak, Chief Technology Officer, TUI Student Travel. “But people were screaming within the business about how slow the systems were and how the virtual servers and virtual storage were not performing up to expectations, so we had to make a change.”

Performance of channel drive enhances virtual storage process

Rather than embark on a costly process of purchasing higher performance drives, TUI Student Travel did a re-configuration on their SAN and rolled out V-locity. This allowed them to put the majority of their virtual servers on low-cost, low-end drives, but achieve the performance of a high-end fibre channel drive.

“It’s a complex environment with six high-end Dell blade servers that host approximately 230 virtual servers in a 4-node active/active failover configuration using two EMC Clariion SAN’s as our storage base,” continued Michael Novak. “Since implementing V-locity Virtual storage App, the average response time has gone down from 50-60 milliseconds down to less than 5 and people have suddenly stopped screaming about performance.”

V-locity virtual storage platform disk optimizer

V-locity virtual platform disk optimizer with InvisiTasking technology installs on the Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V OS that is running the virtual host and all Windows virtual machines (guests). Each component optimizes its respective Windows OS and performs defragmentation of files and consolidation of free space.