Customer Stories

posted on 22 July 2008 11:55

TCP/IP Offload Engine (TOE) cards from Alacritech have doubled the throughput of servers at Boone County, Miss, in serving maps to users.

Boone County, in central Missouri, has thousands of maps and aerial photos of the county available to tens of thousands of home owners, architects, contractors, hunters and hikers as well as mortgage companies and banks. The maps contain data ranging from traffic, zoning and geological information to registered offender lists and voting districts. Maps and images are served up by a GIS (Geographical Information System) application in a service provided free of charge to residents and local businesses, with more than 150,000 requests for maps processed each month.

Jason Warzinik, GIS Program Manager for the county, has deployed a new GIS application and was conscious of system performance. The storage burden involved up nearly 2 terabytes of storage capacity, 98 percent of which was for the high-quality parcel maps and aerial photographs. Map generation fror users coming in over a TCP/IP link took up to five seconds. Boone County has offloaded the TCP/IP procesing from the servers on to Alachritech Scalable Network Accelerator TOE cards and more than halved the imagery delivery time down to two seconds.

Warzinik said: "Performance was really weighing heavily on my mind as I deployed the new GIS applications. It was really important that people actually used the software, and if it took more than five or ten seconds to pull up a map, they weren’t likely to use it. It was important that we got this right the first time.”

“Our I/O meter performance testing shows that throughput has doubled. But most importantly, users noticed a notable performance increase in map refresh rates once the Alacritech card was installed, and that means that they are likely to continue to use the online service.”

Because of the performance increase, Boone County GIS users are able to load each map much faster, ensuring that the GIS mapping applications are more convenient than phone-in or walk-up requests. Users are able to access the maps from anywhere, making GIS data more available to those who need it. Also county employees are simultaneously able to log into the desktop application at work.

Prior to the GIS application and TOE card implementation, each county department was responsible for managing their own hardcopy maps, much of them redundant with other departments. Now a single group manages the service, standardizing how the maps are generated, backed up and disseminated to the public. Because of the increased performance and accessibility, a time-consuming, manual process has been taken out of the hands of individual departments, enabling staff members to focus on other projects.

Deploying Alacritech’s dynamic TCP offload cards has also resulted in fewer servers being required, less capital expenditure, fewer software licenses, lower support requirements and less power consumed.

^{[Paul Warren, staff writer, based on an Alacritech release.]}