Case Study - Fusion-io

Power Sports Industry Leader, Polaris,
Fusion Powers Its IT Infrastructure

Power Sports Industry Leader, Polaris,
Fusion Powers Its IT Infrastructure
Polaris Industries supercharges its web infrastructure with
ioTurbine and ioDrives
The Challenge
Polaris Industries designs, manufactures, and markets innovative, highquality,
off-road vehicles (ORVs), including all-terrain vehicles (ATVs) and
the Polaris RANGER ® side-by-side vehicles, snowmobiles, motorcycles and
on-road electric/hybrid powered vehicles.
For Polaris Infrastructure Manager, Adam Knutson and team, performance
is everything. Their objective is to use technology to deliver solutions that
increase revenue, lower costs, and improve quality. His goal is to increase
productivity throughout the entire supply chain, including customers,
dealers, suppliers, employees, and business partners.
The Polaris website is their primary worldwide dealership channel.
Maintaining a rich-media customer experience on the website drives high
user-retention rates for both dealers and end-customers, and helps to
lower Polaris’ costs and increase revenue. “Ensuring performance in a
virtualized infrastructure to scale and support a web-based rich-media
customer experience, including video, high resolution photos, order
details, and customer info, was going to be a challenge,” Adam said.
“My options were limited, as I needed to keep the existing storage and
network infrastructure of the Dealership portal extranet.”
Fusion-io Hardware Partner
Solution Focus
• ioTurbine software
• VMware ESXi 5.0
• Microsoft SQL Server 2012
• Microsoft Sharepoint 2007
• Microsoft IIS.net
SUMMARY OF BENEFITS
• Up to 5X faster rich-media web
page loads improves customer
experience
• Enables performance intensive
workloads to be virtualized
• Drops into existing NetApp
infrastructure
• Reduces I/O load on NetApp
storage and increases NetApp
performance
“We run pretty high density, anywhere
from 20-30 VMs per host; with
ioTurbine we were able to increase
performance even with these high
densities. That’s huge!”
Adam Knutson,
Infrastructure Manager,
Polaris Industries
©2012 Fusion-io, Inc. All rights reserved. ioDrive and ioTurbine are trademarks of Fusion-io in the United States and/or other
WWW.FUSIONIO.COM countries. All other product and company names and marks mentioned in this document are property of their respective owners. 3

The Solution
“I had heard of Fusion-io and their ioTurbine software from industry news and other colleagues, so I put them
on my ‘need to watch list’,” said Adam. “I am glad I did, because for virtualizing my web infrastructure, their
solution went beyond my expectations.”
Increased VM Density and Blazing Performance
Adam and his team virtualized eight physical blade web servers. “We run pretty high density, anywhere from
20-30 VMs per host; with ioTurbine we were able to increase performance even with these high densities,” said
Adam. “That’s huge!”
Adam added, “Prior to installing ioTurbine, our public web page loads were taking 3-5 seconds and the dealer
portal pages were taking around 4 seconds. Now, even the media-rich pages load in less than 1 second.”
Web Page Load Times
Without ioTurbine
With ioTurbine
Less than 1 second
Up to 5 seconds
5X Improvement
Extending NETAPP Life with a Drop In Solution
Polaris needed a solution that solved its performance challenges without significant investment, and without
requiring major architecture or software changes. The ioTurbine solution was a perfect fit.
Adam said, “Once we started using ioTurbine for our virtualized web servers, we noticed that the associated
NetApp systems worked faster as well. Since the read I/O was being satisfied from cache, my storage systems
could process write I/O much, much faster. I hadn’t anticipated this, but I’ll take all the performance I can get!”
Enabling a More Powerful Virtual Environment
With Fusion-io, the Polaris team was able to implement a performance tier separate from a capacity tier. “We
now have the flexibility to quickly deploy solutions for our evolving business needs and can scale performance
for a fraction of the cost with Fusion-io than with traditional disk-based solutions,” said Adam. “We were able
to turn 8 of our ESX servers into a performance tier and continue to use the remaining 12 servers for capacity
which gives us plenty of headroom for future growth.”
WWW.FUSIONIO.COM
©2012 Fusion-io, Inc. All rights reserved. ioDrive and ioTurbine are trademarks of Fusion-io in the United States and/or other
countries. All other product and company names and marks mentioned in this document are property of their respective owners. 4

System Changes to Virtual Environment
BEFORE ioTURBINE
AFTER ioTURBINE
ESXI 5.0
20 VMware Hosts
Physical MS SQL Clusters
SQL Server 2012
NetApp FAS3240
Sharepoint 2007
IIS.net
NetApp FAS3240
©2012 Fusion-io, Inc. All rights reserved. ioDrive and ioTurbine are trademarks of Fusion-io in the United States and/or other
WWW.FUSIONIO.COM countries. All other product and company names and marks mentioned in this document are property of their respective owners. 5

Summary
Polaris’s NetApp system enjoys the following benefits as a result of deploying Fusion-io:
• Up to 5X faster rich-media web page loads improves customer experience
• Enables performance intensive workloads to be virtualized
• Drops into existing NetApp infrastructure
• Reduces I/O load on NetApp storage and increases NetApp performance
Adam told us, “I must continually provide strong business integration with the ability to quickly deploy solutions
that support evolving and differentiating business strategies. ioTurbine allows me to do this more effectively
than I thought possible.”
About Polaris
Polaris is a recognized leader in the powersports industry with annual 2011 sales of $2.7 billion. Polaris designs,
engineers, manufactures and markets innovative, high quality off-road vehicles (ORVs), including all-terrain
vehicles (ATVs) and the Polaris RANGER ® side-by-side vehicles, snowmobiles, motorcycles and on-road electric/
hybrid powered vehicles.
Polaris is among the global sales leaders for both snowmobiles and off-road vehicles and has established a
presence in the heavyweight cruiser and touring motorcycle market with the Victory and Indian motorcycle
brands. Additionally, Polaris continues to invest in the global on-road small electric/hybrid vehicle industry with
Global Electric Motorcars (GEM) and Goupil Industrie SA, and internally developed vehicles. Polaris enhances
the riding experience with a complete line of Pure Polaris apparel, accessories and parts, available at Polaris
dealerships.
Polaris Industries Inc. trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol “PII,” and the Company is
included in the S&P Mid-Cap 400 stock price index.
Information about the complete line of Polaris products, apparel and vehicles accessories are available from
authorized Polaris dealers or anytime at www.polaris.com.
WWW.FUSIONIO.COM
©2012 Fusion-io, Inc. All rights reserved. ioDrive and ioTurbine are trademarks of Fusion-io in the United States and/or other
countries. All other product and company names and marks mentioned in this document are property of their respective owners. 6