MORE – The Dream of Every CIO
MORE – a revolutionary virtualization solution, allows, for the first time, to realize the dream of every CIO – within a few days there will be stable response times throughout the day, performance improvement by tens of percents to the most important processes in the organization, the availability of the system will increase, while saving over 25% on IT expenses, and business limitations of the organization, due to technology, will be reduced to a minimum.
Amir Tamari
It is a well-known fact that the business requirements of every organization change frequently, while, at the same time, causing chnaging demand for computer resources.
Thus, for example, the functions of calculating salaries and producing reports, at the end of each month, demand extensive computer resources, substantially more than the usual daily workload. Consequently, computer resources are acquired in accordance with peak consumption points, creating a situation where they are not exploited during most days of the month. In an age where pressure is increasing to do more with less, every CIO aspires to maximize the flexibility of the organization, while exploiting the computing resources and avoiding superfluous purchase of hardware, processing power, I/O, and various energy consuming IT devices. The ultimate solution in response to this aspiration is a system that is capable of allocating computer resources which are suited to the requirements of a specific business transaction in real-time. Despite the great strides in the field of virtualization, no such system had been developed in the world, until the revolutionary development of MORE-VRP from MORE IT RESOURCES LTD.
In a special interview with MORE CEO, Eliran Malki, and the COO, Eilon Rosman, they describe the business challenges in organizations, which have propelled the development of the software and the unique capabilities that have credited the Company with the recognition of Gartner, Oppenheimer, DEMO and special grants from the Government Chief Scientist and from Oracle.
• Before diving in, can you briefly explain to me what does your software solution do?
MORE provides the ability to affect and determine QoS and stable response times to IT users. By using MORE, loaded systems can be stabilized and the maximum IT resources at your disposal may be exploited. MORE VRP is a Virtual Resource Partitioning technology; that is, allocation of IT resources to a process, such as a specific transaction, according to its importance in real-time. So, for example, our solution can cause the transaction of the CEO or a CRM user to run faster – it is a solution that takes the world of virtualization 3 generations forward. For the first time ever and anywhere, a system enables tremendous improvement, by tens of percents, in the performance and availability of existing systems, while substantially saving on energy costs and allowing maximum business flexibility.
A waste of 10,000 monthly hours
• What are the business challenges that organizations face, which brought you to develop this solution?
We are convinced that the objective of every Chief Information Officer is to provide a flexible IT infrastructure that allows the organization to contend with any possible business development, to provide top-notch service and fast response times to his consumers. For example, slow response times in ERP Systems causes workers to waste precious time, which, according to independent studies, may amount to half an hour per worker per day. So, for example, in an organization of 1000 workers – every day, each worker wastes approximately half an hour in waiting times for computer systems - We are talking about approx. 10,000 monthly hours of wasted worker time, in which employees could have made a more significant contribution to the organization, than merely waiting.
"The results are evident one day after installation"
The business needs of the organization are changing frequently, in accordance with the level of competition, seasonality, end of month, end of quarterly, daily closing, etc. If we take an example from the television – on the night of choosing the winning song in the local version of the American Idol series, the systems of the mobile phone companies have to support a substantially greater load than any other time of the year – the hardware and software must withstand this peak for a half an hour each year, while the rest of the time they remain idle. Until now, there was no other option but to acquire hardware systems, discs and software with massive capacities, solely for this purpose.
Today, in every transaction based system, there is also a load created by special processes, batch processes, backups, special reports, etc. All these burden the systems, and slow down the response times. For example, when the financial, marketing, production or sales department run a quarterly report, an inventory or salaries report, all the users in the system experience a dramatic decrease in response times. One process may draw all the resources and slow down all other users. Consequently, the CIO does not sleep well at nights, because the entire management is nagging him.
• What about websites that provide electronic commerce services, and are compelled to withstand unexpected loads of site-users?
Here to it is evident that the systems suffer from the same phenomenon. In websites, when there is a load of 100% of the system capacity, the users will be unable to perform the actions for which they had entered the site. That is, if you have a stock portfolio and you're trying to access the bank website, when the systems are overloaded, you may well be denied access. In terms of websites that deal with sales, this unequivocally implies tangible monetary losses. In other sites, it may imply abandonment of clients, loss of a competitive edge and severe damage to business reputation. Using MORE, we are able to stabilize the CPU and I/O load at approx. 80%-85% of the hardware capacity, and thus prevent time-outs or shutdown due to the load.
Buying 4 times more than your real needs
• How did organizations deal until now with the phenomena you have described?
They simply purchased a lot of hardware and invested large amounts of money in computer resources which are under-utilized most of the time; in other words, they invest in purchasing machines that are 2-4 times more than what they really need. Another widespread solution is to shift much of the activity to the night. The problem is that, in an age where everyone is working on-line, the window of time in which the system is not loaded is diminishing, and becomes difficult to manage over the long term.
In an analogy to the road system – IT is like a highway – when it is empty, you may drive full-speed; though in the morning on the way to work, stuck in a major traffic-jam, a car that is capable of going 200 Km/h goes, in the best case scenario, 10 km/h. Indeed, we may build roads with 12 lanes at a massive cost; however, there will mostly be an enormous waste since a lot of the time the road will be empty. In what other ways is this solved on the roads – time distribution – for example, trucks drive only at night; or alternatively, separation of environments – if one highway is jammed, then go via another highway (the problem is that this road is jammed too)…
Some may go further for the ultimate solution – simply killing transactions. In an analogy to our roads, there are some who simply push cars off the road. A DBA says: "OK, these reports are loading the system, therefore you may only run them once a month"; in other words, a state where the infrastructure personnel tell the finance personnel or business managers – "You are disrupting our work"…
• How do you solve all these problems?
For the first time ever, MORE-VRP software provides virtualization of computer resources for a transaction – Virtual Resource Partitioning. The solution of MORE is a unique and revolutionary software that enables the organization to deal with problems of overload, bottlenecks and performance in database applications, by routing the resources according to the prioritization of the organization in real-time.
Our software was recognized by Gartner as a unique product worldwide. The product allows the organization to solve, in real-time, problems of overload that are caused due to CPU, I/O and memory problems, while making it possible to formulate a simpler IT architecture and culture: there is no need to "kill" burdening queries, to execute heavy processes at night or during the weekend, to separate the production environment from the data warehouse, and to rely on non-updated data, and all at a negligible price considering the alternatives of buying extra hardware and software, whose sole purpose is to respond at peak times.
We can provide value overnight – it is software – the results may be evident one day after installation. It is no coincidence that we were presented a $100,000 grant from Oracle and the Government Chief Scientist. We are improving the speed of Oracle's ERP databases by 40% on average and, in certain instances up to eight times the speed. It should be noted that, as opposed to other virtualization systems, we use less than 0.5%-1% of a single CPU, which is substantially more efficient than any other virtualization.
How much resources will be allocated to each transaction
• What added values are gained by the organizations implementing your solution?
Our solution allows organizations to substantially cut-down their IT expenses and, as a result of reducing the size of their hardware units, and also to cut-down on energy expenses. Another advantage of our solution is in maintaining a fixed level of service under any condition and virtually independent of the load on the system.
Furthermore, using MORE, you exploit the computer to the fullest, while providing business flexibility, so that the CEO and CFO reports will run quickly under any conditions.
It must be emphasized that organizations using MORE will be able to provide solutions to exceptional and unexpected events. After all, it is impossible to make a substantial purchase of servers each time an extraordinary and one-time event occurs and only for the purpose of this event. Our goal is therefore to provide more availability and less downtime.
• How do you do this?
We take the transactions and extend or reduce their response times. In reality, using an innovative GUI, we are able to observe and control transactions ad-hoc and in real-time, or in accordance with pre-designed rules. Furthermore, the GUI provides full and comprehensive information on the system loads and the running processes. We are able to automatically allocate IT resources to any transaction, based on a broad variety of parameters – and then each transaction may receive more or less resources. Operations personnel have very high flexibility in determining the execution policy, at the user level, by time, or by processes, while considering in real-time all other processes that are running in the system in parallel.
In an analogy to a highway – our system administrator can catch every vehicle and route it to a designated road that corresponds with its pace of progress and our interest in it. Parameters may be defined to the system using a GUI interface, so that everything can be defined from anywhere in the world, including from various mobile devices, while having the ability to solve problems immediately.
• What examples do you already have of implementation of the System?
At NICE Systems, where the System has been installed in the ERP environment, slow-downs in the users' work rate had occurred throughout the day, due to running certain reports that loaded the system. We then made rules that allocate resources to processes according to their priority, which brought about stability in the system's response times during all hours of the day, and a substantial improvement in the satisfaction of the users.
In HR Electronics, we implemented a project that the scope of savings it created was 10 times more a year. Efi Neman, CIO of HR Electronics, stated in reference to the Project that: "Any delay caused by the IT system, causes a production user or service provider to delay an entire production line and reduces the production rate in the entire factory; so, at an organizational and business level, there are fluctuations in our production rate and which causes monetary loss. We searched for a unique solution to this problem, and we found that MORE allows us to dramatically shorten computing and production processes, according to our own priority, so that the important processes are completed faster; there is a substantial reduction in our response-times and we have become more efficient and competitive".
Other examples with impressive results may be found among dozens of clients from the financial, hi-tech, defense, insurance, credit-card, telecom and industry sectors.
13. pc.co.il .2008 14 January . newspaper 1290 .InformationWeek
|
