Pure Storage Case Studies | Kareo
Kareo’s SaaS Performance Gets Healthy with Pure Storage
UP TO 80% PERFORMANCE GAINS INVIGORATE CUSTOMER SERVICE
The Challenge: Replace Ailing Disk-based SAN with Tier 1 Flash
Storage Without Breaking the Bank
Kareo Inc. is the leading provider of cloud-based medical office software and services for small
medical practices, helping more than 20,000 medical providers more efficiently manage the
business and clinical sides of their practice. Kareo provisions each customer with their own
dedicated database, actively managing multiple SQL servers running 16,000+ databases. During
peak loads, Kareo’s servers pushed tens of thousands of IOPs to the legacy SAN using iSCSI as
SOLUTION
the primary storage protocol. This I/O overload exceeded the SAN’s throughput limits, introducing
serious latency throughout the system. The SAN slowdown
not only affected system performance but also impacted
customers’ service levels. Kareo’s Network Operations team
decided to upgrade the legacy SAN with a Tier 1 storage
solution for high capacity, high throughput and low latency.
Kareo also required HIPAA-compliant encryption at the disk
layer that would not impact performance.
The Answer: All-Flash Pure Storage
Fits the Bill with High Performance and
Low Latency
It was like the virtual
machine had a shot
of Vitamin C. All the
issues that plagued us
just went away.
Wes North
Director, Network Operations
Kareo was interested in flash storage but most vendors’ all-flash prices were astronomical and hybrid
Large server farm running
over 15,000 SQL Server
databases with Pure
Storage FA-420
Supports VMware and
Hyper-V virtualized servers
SYSTEM
IMPROVEMENT
flash alternatives lacked performance. When colleagues recommended the Pure Storage FlashArray,
Kareo’s Network Operations team considered this option because its feature set met all of Kareo’s
Tier 1 requirements, including near instantaneous database query performance. Kareo decided to do
5:1 data reduction
a proof of concept comparing a Pure Storage FA-420 to the existing legacy SAN.
The Operations team copied 20TB of data onto the Pure Storage device and was impressed by the
Over 200,000 IOPs
ease and speed of the data copy. The FlashArray then proceeded to win performance, compression
and latency tests across the board with both physical and virtual servers. “I remember the look on
the engineers’ faces when they performed the benchmark against Pure versus the traditional storage
solution,” said Wes North, Director, Network Operations.
The first production application they tested was a Mongo database that periodically wrote large
Built-in HIPAA-compliant
disk-level encryption
with no performance
degradation
volumes of files to the legacy SAN. This caused serious latency throughout the virtual server farm.
Kareo moved the Mongo VM to Pure Storage where the database dutifully wrote thousands of files
per second to disk at a consistent and predictable high rate. North reported, “We moved one of our
DATA REDUCTION
most talkative instances from traditional storage to Pure and the result has been fantastic.”
The Solution: The FlashArray Lets Kareo Give 70-80%
Performance Booster Shot to Customers
5:1
Within three months Kareo migrated over 500 production volumes to Pure Storage. Compression
yielded 5:1 capacity improvements and latency dropped dramatically. North explained, “Before we
implemented Pure Storage, latency was over 200 milliseconds, and now we no longer see the huge
latency peaks, especially when we are pushing gigabytes worth of data per second. Add on top of
that the fact we are doing this with encryption and compression.” Moreover, with Pure Storage’s data
reduction levels, Kareo halved their per-GB storage costs. “We’re seeing 4.5 to 5:1 data reduction in
terms of compression. Now we have almost 20TB of data using 5.6TB of space, which is incredible.”
The optimized SQL databases made a big difference in customer service levels. Kareo’s flagship
application yielded an incredible 70-80% gain in performance across complex data loads and
queries resulting in improvements in service delivery and stability. “Pure is a game changer for us,”
said North.
BEFORE
AFTER