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. 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 SETAO transportation management network, run from two virtualised data centres in Orléans, spans 24,000 kilometres and includes nearly 1,100 pieces of equipment and 300 mobile devices. The system runs day and night to carry about 100,000 daily passengers. To manage the required amount of data, the company maintains 15 Oracle databases and other applications on 70 virtual machines using VMware.




Transport management

“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.”

The company also runs sophisticated traffic simulation software which, in the event of a major accident or other issue, enables them to explore different re-routing scenarios to find the optimum response to keep traffic flowing.



SETAO said it experienced issues with its ageing storage infrastructure saying that during a power electrical outage, their system was badly impacted and they were unable to recover all the data. Performance issues due to resource contention happened as it ran simulation applications and its video archive project required additional capacity.

“We realised 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.”

Solution

Parcollet and his team began looking for a system that could easily be scaled, was simple to operate, that met their requirements for low environmental impact, and would be reliable – even during an interruption of electricity. They 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.



In the end, they chose two Pillar Axiom SAN systems, replicated between their two data centres, each with 16TB of capacity. Soon after deployment they added an additional 50TB to support a project to store and manage video from municipal surveillance cameras. To accommodate their transportation simulation application, they later added Pillar’s SSD Bricks to their Axiom storage system.

“We had already seen a big performance jump over our old system when we brought in the Axiom with SATA,” Mr. Parcollet said. “But when we added the SSD it was beyond what we expected. We can run our simulation application 20 times faster using SSD over SATA.”

SETAO is operating a mixed SATA and SSD environment saying it didn't experience any drops in performance.

“We use the system for co-ordination of services,” Mr. Parcollet said. “Adding high-performance SSD to the regular SATA means we can boost the performance of our premium class of service by 20X. All of our tiers of storage are running on the same system, and all performing exactly as we expect.”




The low power use assoiated wtih SSD based systems impressed the company. Mr. Parcollet said: “We realised that after just under one year in production, we could reduce our annual electricity bill by 6 times. We need 650 Watts of electricity to run the Pillar Axiom, but we would have needed 4,000 Watts with the competing systems – all with the same capacity. It’s a very impressive ratio.”




Running traffic simiulations has benefited from moving to SSD.

“Now with the SSD system we can simulate in real-time, which was not possible before,” Mr. Parcollet said. “Today we can run several scenarios in real time and make the right choice at the right moment. Now traffic problems can be almost immediately resolved. From legal archival projects on VTL, to standard mission and critical applications, to very high critical applications like being able to run 20 or 30 times more simulations per day,” said Mr. Parcollet.

This case study was written by Pillar Systems and edited for publication.

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