About BrainPad:
BrainPad helps big enterprises’ in dealing with their big data in such a manner that will increase profitability and productivity of their database system by rationalizing and effectively utilizing data-mining and key constraint optimization. BrainPad handles business activities of various companies to get improved with their system building capabilities, data analysis, SaaS services provision. BrainPad, Inc. provides following:
- Web-based data mining
- Business Analytics
- Operational research
- Mathematical solutions for businesses
For the same purpose, BrainPad’s tool named as L2Mixer was used for providing Business Intelligence on end-user, PPC (pay-per-click) behavior and allowing companies to generalize product pricing.
BrainPad’s Business Objective:
Being a leader in research and web analytics, as product line & customer base of BrainPad increased with a more load on their system’s database, resulted into slow down on the performance of their services. So, BrainPad set following objectives to target at first instance:
- To increase processing speeds of its tool L2Mixer Solution.
- Speed analysis times of its rule-based Rtoaster recommendation system which processes too large data sets to hold in memory.
- Cutting costs and maintenance reduction.
- Implementing such a technology which is reliable in such a way that can handle its big-data effectively.
Approach / Strategy Adopted By BrainPad:
Following were some major changes carried out by BrainPad. Though they were more risky in terms of high investment and complete replacement perspective but they took this risk by performing following tasks:
- Tsuyoshi, a vendor for BrainPad’s recommended to install a 160GB ioDrive (Input/Output memory drive) in one of BrainPad’s databases to run heavier reporting jobs without getting delayed.
- What they did next is to speeding up the performance of its L2Mixer reporting tool by completely transferring its database from hard drive to I/O Drive to cut wait time for PPC processing from 18% to just 8%.
- What they did with L2Mixer, in a same way they added another ioDrive to RToaster SQL database system to achieve impressive results by reducing batch job processing timings.
- Implemented simpler systems which are quite easy to maintain.
- They also upgraded highly technology oriented service system. ioDrivers were compatible enough with BrainPad’s new server based system which was more reliable, flexible and easier to modify.
Result Achieved By BrainPad:
By effective implementation of ioDrive provided them the following results:
- Complete assurance of PPC of customers getting timely business intelligence.
- 2 times faster pay-per-click data intensive analysis.
- 29 times faster calculation of aggregate data.
- 10 times fast summary reporting.
- 4 times fast data modelling.
- 30 times faster batch jobs by ensuring accurate & product recommendation services.
- 50% smaller pay-per-click intelligence database system and 33% smaller product recommendation system.
- Easier maintenance by eliminating weekly tuning jobs, 6 times faster SQL product recommendation vacuum jobs and more reliable, simpler system.
Learnings:
BrainPad says, “A normal batch job, which used to take about 4 hours to complete previously, processed in less than 30 minutes now. Since the ioDrive has doubled the number of threads now we can run 8 to 10 threads at parallel times at the same time.” Now BrainPad is able to provide product recommendation and web analytics with less of workload. Big data is not a problem anymore to handle for them with upgraded server and database system. Performance now is high enough to get more SLAs by enduring to provide web analytics and pricing report quickly. They also learnt that how they can reduce the load from their hard drive and speeding up the processing.
Well done Apurva. Very good effort. I’ll share it with my students.
Thanks… Dr. Indrajit…..It was really one of the toughest case studies I have ever got till now.
Hi Apurva, the case study is nice and well detailed ……..However, I still not able to relate this with Title . How ” Web Analytics help them to achieve results faster”…..I think it is 160 GB i/o drive which help BrainPad to perform its function faster…………
Hi Apurva, Nicely organised case study ……..However, I still not able to relate this with Title . How ” Web Analytics help them to achieve results faster”…..I think it is 160 GB i/o drive which help BrainPad to perform its function faster…………
Hi Karun,
thanks….and yes I actually felt the same when I read this case study that title is not approriate but then its digital vidya’s team who assigned the title …which should be domain specific.