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Home >> Success Stories >> Veridian Success Stories
Engineering Firm Stocks Up on FlashDisks The Organization --www.veridian.com Based near Washington, D.C., Veridian, Inc., has a 50-year tradition of providing information technology and advanced engineering consulting for the national security and to the safety industry. The company's 4,500 computer professionals, scientists, engineers, and test pilots work on projects ranging from testing an automobile crash notification system to building a secure Internet link in space. Veridian's customers include NASA; the departments of Defense, Transportation, and Justice; the military services of all allied nations; and major aircraft manufacturers. For 1999, the company had revenues of $600 million and acquired three companies. Based in Buffalo, New York, Veridian Engineering, one of the largest Veridian operating companies, specializes in test and evaluation of major aircraft, spacecraft, and automobiles. FlashDisk Customer Profile as Told By Veridian Engineering "Several years ago, a consultant recommended that Veridian Engineering install its financial system, Deltek's Cost Point, on a Hewlett-Packard 9000 with a 35 GB RAID storage system. The Oracle 7.4 database used by Cost Point grew faster than we could have ever anticipated. In fact, we had reached the maximum capacity of the HP RAID system. The 4,500-rpm disks couldn't provide the speed we needed. We looked at some of the newer HP systems, but decided not to go with them because of the high cost. Meanwhile, the company had become a Sun shop. Since our financial application could run equally well on a Sun server, we decided to go with two Sun servers - an E450 as the production server, and an E250, as the backup and testing server. We decided not to buy Sun storage because it was too expensive. Also, we hadn't been happy with the interface on some of our Sun storage systems. Also, the Sun systems were too complicated to configure and too complex to learn. So we went from a HP system with dual 200 MHz processors and 4,500-rpm disks to a Sun 450 production server with a 400 MHz processor and the Winchester Systems' FlashDisk RAID storage system with 7,200-rpm disks. Both the production server and the Sun E250 backup server have their own FlashDisk. Since we had very detailed logs on how long specific jobs took with the HP system, we could easily compare the performance of similar jobs with the new system. Overall, a job that took two hours before, now took about 45 minutes or 50 minutes. Meanwhile, the performance of long batch jobs took 40 percent less time than before. Also, user response requests took about 45 percent less time than before. These increases in performance definitely pleased us. The Sun servers function as a mirrored set. Mirroring the FlashDisks didn't take long and it was easy to do. One of our administrators went through the FlashDisk manual and then configured the FlashDisks. He also went over the configuration with an engineer from Winchester Systems. The FlashDisks were easier to configure than either the HP or the Sun. About a month later, we bought another FlashDisk to be shared by two Windows NT file and print servers for a project engineering application. We partitioned the FlashDisk so that each server has half of the storage. The user home directories reside on one half of the FlashDisk, and the shared project directories, on the other half. Two months later, we bought another FlashDisk. We configured this to one to run with a new Sun E250 server for a special financial transaction. Overall, we've been happy with FlashDisk's performance, reliability, and open systems architecture."
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