PDF《Pure Storage and Rubrik Keep TTX》

Pure Storage and Rubrik Keep TTX on Track to Optimize Railcar Pooling Operations INDUSTRY Transportation USE CASE ? Database C Microsoft SQL Server? ? VSI C VMware? vSphere? THE CHALLENGE ? Storage bottlenecks caused delays in the company'

s critical railcar- tracking application.

? Initial use of solid-state storage failed to eliminate performance problems. ? Lengthy backup windows and recovery times increased the complexity of managing multiple fragmented solutions. BUSINESS TRANSFORMATION The business-critical railcar-tracking application runs without delay, ensuring peak utilization of the company'

s key assets. Complex BI analytics can now run without impacting routine business functions. IT TRANSFORMATION ? Simplified data protection delivers instant recovery time objectives, more granular recovery performance objectives, and the ability to archive to the cloud. ? Performance problems with key asset tracking, asset management and data warehouse applications disappear. ? Complex BI analyses can be run without impacting production workloads. TTX Company is responsible for the efficient management of nearly a quarter million railcars. To ensure each railcar maintains optimal utilization, the company'

s IT infrastructure must operate at peak efficiency. When lagging performance of its storage system created bottlenecks, the company installed all-flash arrays from Pure Storage. The new data platform coupled with Rubrik'

s comprehensive data management solution have eliminated performance problems and vastly simplified storage management tasks for the lean IT staff. At a casual glance, a long freight train carrying scores of shipping containers may not seem like a very technology-intensive activity. But it certainly is from the perspective of TTX Company. TTX is a railcar pooling company that owns, maintains and manages a fleet of more than 230,000 railcars used by the nine North American railroads that own TTX. By using TTX, the railroads save capital and operating costs, and benefit from the assurance of always having railcars when and where they are needed. In 2016, TTX carried

11 million intermodal shipments (shipping containers on flat railcars), and transported

11 million autos and trucks, as well as other goods including lumber, steel, paper and raw materials. In the last five years, TTX has invested $3.8 billion in new railcars, and spends more than $600 million annually on maintenance, using a network of facilities spread across the country. Tracking the movement of railcars is at the heart of TTX operations and the IT department that supports it. That task is handled by the company'

s flagship application, Unified Fleet Distribution? (UFD), developed in-house and based on Microsoft SQL Server. It is a highly transactional application that handles more than a million messages on a routine day, noted Chad Plemons, Director of Digital Operations. Each message contains information about the location of a railcar, so the size of each message is not very large, but the volume we handle is huge. So, there'

s a lot of I/O activity and a lot of reads as TTX employees track where a car is. A QUEST FOR A SOLUTION LEADS TO PURE STORAGE With the high volume of queries and messages, we were beating on that database very heavily. At times the system would fall behind, meaning a message might not appear on the user interface for a couple of hours after it was received. That is unacceptable, as our goal is to operate as close to real-time as possible. We quickly determined storage was a bottleneck. So, we started looking for options, Plemons said. CASE STUDY | TTX COMPANY The first approach was to add a shelf of solid-state memory to the company'