The most recent global survey
of IT professionals from Condusiv Technologies delineates the cost/performance choices facing SQL database-intensive industries as they cope with large-scale change.
The 2019 I/O Performance Survey from Condusiv Technologies, which represents the responses of over 900 IT professionals worldwide, confirms that SQL databases are both respondents’ top business-critical applications platform and also their leading cause of staff/customer complaints due to sluggish applications. “I/O performance in SQL,” says Condusiv CEO James D’Arezzo, “is a problem for CIOs and IT heads across the entire economy.” D’Arezzo, whose company is the world leader in I/O reduction and SQL database performance, adds, “It has a particularly significant impact on industries that are both highly data-intensive and rapidly changing.”
One such industry is banking and finance, which faces competition from a growing list of potential disruptors, including the so-called GAFA (Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple) quartet of tech giants. GAFA have already shown interest in becoming a player in finance, with initiatives ranging from providing various parts of the payment process to obtaining local banking licenses.1 Perhaps as a result, the 2019 edition of a widely cited annual survey of retail banking trends shows that for the first time, the use of data, artificial intelligence, and advanced analytics has replaced improving the customer experience as the industry’s number-one concern.2
Another industry in flux is healthcare, which, under both governmental and inter-organizational pressure, is struggling to resolve turf wars among the various providers of electronic health records systems.3 Added to this challenge is the current explosion in medical research, in which the pace of data creation is far outstripping organizations’ ability to store and analyze it.4 Meanwhile, the healthcare segment is expected to see a significant increase in the use of highly data-intensive, artificial-reality-based technologies in the near future.5 A pioneering virtual in-home caregiver system, in fact, was introduced in early January at the International Consumer Electronics Show.6
All these activities are dependent on data analytics, which in turn is dependent upon input-output (I/O) efficiency. This makes it a bit disquieting, notes D’Arezzo, that over half the respondents to Condusiv’s 2019 I/O Performance Survey said they were unaware that Windows write inefficiencies generate increasingly smaller writes and reads that dampen performance, and that this is a software issue that cannot be solved by the addition of new hardware.
“Three-fourths of respondents to our survey, in fact,” says D’Arezzo, “plan to continue to invest in hardware to improve I/O performance. This is not completely unreasonable; new hardware can provide additional capacity and some performance improvement. However, it is neither economical nor a long-term solution to I/O performance degradation. At Condusiv, we have developed software solutions that can—without the need for any additional investment in hardware—improve overall system throughput by 30% to 50%.”
About Condusiv® Technologies
Condusiv Technologies is the world leader in software-only storage performance solutions for virtual and physical server environments, enabling systems to process more data in less time for faster application performance. Condusiv guarantees to solve the toughest application performance challenges with faster-than-new performance via V-locity® for virtual servers and Diskeeper® or SSDkeeper® for physical servers and PCs. With over 100 million licenses sold, Condusiv solutions are used by 90% of Fortune 1000 companies and almost three-quarters of Forbes Global 100 companies to increase business productivity and reduce data center costs while extending the life of existing hardware. Condusiv CEO Jim D’Arezzo has had a long and distinguished career in the high-tech arena.
Condusiv was founded in 1981 by Craig Jensen as Executive Software. Over 37 years, he has taken the thought leadership in file system management and caching and transformed it into enterprise software. For more information, visit http://www.condusiv.com
1. Blomstrom, Duena, “10 Tech and Industry 2019 Predictions That You Will Read Everywhere,” Forbes, December 17, 2018.
2. Marous, Jim, “Top 10 Retail Banking Trends and Predictions For 2019,” The Financial Brand, January 7, 2019.
3. Lagasse, Jeff, “Interoperability remains limited, according to the National Academy of Medicine,” Healthcare Finance News, October 15, 2018.
4. Hiatt, David, “The Next Digital Arms Race in Life Sciences,” Bio-IT World, August 23, 2017.
5. Brown, Meghan, “Tech Trends 2019: Driverless Cars, Artificial Intelligence & Augmented Reality,” engineering.com, January 15, 2019.
6. Baron, Jessica, “New virtual in-home caregiver to debut this month at CES 2019,” TechEngage, January 2, 2019.
