SETAO
SETAO (Société d’Exploitation du Tramway et du réseau de bus de l’Agglomération d’Orléans) manages the urban transportation network of the city of Orléans, about 130 km (80 miles) southwest of Paris in north-central France. With about 100,000 passengers per day, SETAO manages data from their trams and buses, vehicle radios, billing systems, electrical systems, traffic lights, and video feeds from surveillance cameras throughout the city.
In addition to gathering and maintaining this information, the company makes real-time traffic information available to its network of vehicles via mobile devices and makes surveillance data available for law enforcement.
The Challenge
In the bustling metropolis Orléans, the public transportation system runs day and night to carry about 100,000 daily passengers – and so SETAO’s network must be highly available, always running and accurately capturing data in order to monitor and alert users of possible breakdowns in real time. To manage this massive amount of data, the company maintains 15 Oracle databases and other applications on 70 virtual machines using VMware.
"We record all events on the networks," said Olivier Parcollet, IT Manager at SETAO. "Many of the linked infrastructures in the town – radio, police stations, electrical system – are integrated to this project in terms of data."
However, the company experienced reliability issues with their NetApp storage infrastructure. During an electrical outage, their storage system was badly impacted and they were unable to recover all the data. They were experiencing performance issues due to resource contention, and they needed to greatly improve performance to better support their simulation application. They were also concerned about scalability, as they knew they would quickly need to add more capacity to accommodate a video archive project.
"We realized that in order to add capacity to our NetApp system we couldn’t just add new drives," Mr. Parcollet said. "We would have to stop our existing solution and actually exchange it with the manufacturer to get a system with more capacity."
The Solution
SETAO compared systems from NetApp, EMC, and Pillar Data Systems. After running tests on these systems, they found that an Oracle request ran 7 to 10 times faster on the Pillar Axiom. They also stressed the systems and found that while some of the systems demonstrated a drastic reduction in performance and reliability, the Pillar Axiom remained stable.
To accommodate their transportation simulation application, they later added Pillar's SSD Bricks to their Axiom storage system. | 
United Kingdom
