hosting service. As Brendan McPartlan, the Vice President of Operations and. Infrastructure put it, âthe hosting servi
MEDIA & PUBLISHING
The Economist
CUSTOMER SUCCESS STORY
Zadara Storage VPSA provides Enterprise Grade NFS storage for the Economist – addressing key scalability and performance challenges
“Zadara Storage was the only vendor who could provide us with an enterprise-class NFS solution to support our scalability and performance requirements at Amazon Web Services.” Brendan McPartlan, VP of Operations and Infrastructure , The Economist
Customer Profile: The Economist offers authoritative insight and opinion on international news, politics, business, finance, science and technology. They provide both an online and print version of the publication. Challenge: • Prior hosted solution was constantly running out of capacity • Required a full-featured NFS solution – not available from current vendor • Existing performance bottlenecks needed to be addressed Solution: • Zadara Storage VPSA Storage Array – all NFS-based data Results: • Deployed a cloud-based, enterprise-grade NFS solution connecting to AWS compute • Fully scalable storage – never run out of capacity • Improved overall storage performance significantly
The Economist addresses existing scalability and performance issues with Zadara VPSA NFS Storage The Economist is a weekly newspaper owned by the Economist Group and produced in offices based in London. Continuous publication began under founder James Wilson in September 1843. For historical reasons, The Economist refers to itself as a newspaper, but each print edition appears on small glossy paper like a news magazine. Today, circulation is over 1.4 million. The American circulation accounts for over half of the total. The company was using a third-party hosting service to support their rapidly growing image library, customer database and content management system. However, they quickly realized that they were bumping into the architectural limitations of the existing
hosting service. As Brendan McPartlan, the Vice President of Operations and Infrastructure put it, “the hosting service was fully-managed, but not wellmanaged, and therefore, we were constantly running out of capacity. The inability to manage capacity was significantly impacting productivity.” Additionally, the prior hosted solution was not providing the overall performance needed to support internal requirments. The rapid pace of a media and publishing business requires data to be immediately available to meet publishing deadlines. Performance bottlenecks are simply not acceptable, and changes needed to be made.
“On the scalability front, we never run out of capacity. The topic simply never comes up. It isn’t part of the agenda.” “The Zadara snapshots and replication features have been brilliant.” “The Zadara Storage support team and overall commitment to customer satisfaction have been unsurpassed.” – Brendan McPartlan, VP of Operations and Infrastructure, The Economist
The Economist worked closely with their AWS consulting partner, Cloudreach to perform a comprehensive market analysis. After significant due diligence, a shortlist of vendors was selected and evaluated based on features, functionality and physical performance benchmarks. In the end, Zadara Storage was found to be superior in all categories and selected as the vendor of choice. A key requirement for the Economist was to find a cloud-based, NFS storage services solution connecting to their AWS compute evironment. When evaluating the market, Zadara Storage was the only vendor who could provide this capability sufficiently. As Brendan McPartlan put it, “the other solutions we considered simply were not ready for prime time. We were not ready to risk running our business on a product that was not fully-baked.” The bulk of their storage is connected to AWS US East in North Virginia. Their new Zadara VPSA Storage Arrays provide them with high-performance, enterprise-grade NFS file services supporting their image library, customer database and content management system. An additional requirement was to protect their data against any form of data corruption or physical disaster. By working with the Zadara Storage team, the Economist architected a combination of snapshots for rapid data recovery and remote mirroring for disaster recovery. Their AWS US East
data is now being mirrored to AWS US West in Northern California. By using the Zadara Storage snapshot and replication features, the Economist is well protected against any type of disaster. “The results have been fantastic”, said Brendan McPartlan. “On the scalability front, we never run out of capacity. The topic simply never comes up. It isn’t part of the agenda. We are able to expand our volumes as needed, in a just-in-time approach.” Further, the performance concerns have been eliminated. “The way the Zadara team architected the environment by putting our storage close to our AWS instances in US East and US West, we are now seeing significant overall performance improvements.” Zadara’s ability to provide enterprise grade NFS functionality was critical in architecting a business continuity and disaster recovery strategy for the company. “The Zadara snapshots and replication features have been brilliant. We now meet our stringent requirements for data protection and are able to recover from any potential disaster.” “As an AWS customer who required full featured NFS functionality, we were thrilled to identify Zadara Storage. No other vendor was able to provide the features and fuctionality we needed. Other solutions simply were not fullybaked”, said McPartlan. “Overall, we are extremly pleased. The Zadara Storage support team and overall commitment to customer satisfaction have been unsurpassed”.
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