MarketLive Uses Scale Computing Clustered Storage

Since 1995, MarketLive, Inc. has provided enterprise-class eCommerce retail technology and services that help companies sell goods and services online. Designed to meet the requirements of catalogers, retailers, direct marketers, and manufacturers, the MarketLive eCommerce Suite and MarketLive’s best practices-based Intelligent Selling methodology enable merchants to enhance their customers’ experience online while improving acquisition, conversion, and retention rates.

Business Situation
MarketLive powers over 160 retail Web sites that generate over $2 billion dollars in sales annually. Downtime for their customers’ sites is not an option. MarketLive was already using NetApp and Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) optimized SAN Storage as their primary storage solution, but they also needed to install a secondary back-up storage solution to sync data in near real-time and to run any site issues in a test environment. Backup to tape was not an option since it would be time consuming and expensive.  

Solution
After realizing that replicating their primary storage solution of NetApp and HDS SAN Storage as their secondary solution as well would be much too expensive, MarketLive evaluated Scale Computing’s Intelligent Clustered Storage (ICS) solution. The Scale solution promised to decrease costs, increase control and make storage management more convenient for their IT administrators.

• Entry-level 3TB StarterSAN SN1000: 3 SN1000’s with 3TB of useable capacity
• SAN/NAS storage node
• iSCSI, NFS, CIFS
• Snapshot/replication
• Full mirror/stripe data protection
• Unlimited software license
• SATA drive

Benefits
Scale Computing gives MarketLive, peace of mind and assurance that their they can provide optimal availability and data protection for their retail customers. The ability to scale incrementally, as small as 1TB, also allows MarketLive to incrementally purchase only the storage they currently need. The Scale solution MarketLive has implemented has saved them 70 percent when compared to their primary storage solution.

Case Study
MarketLive, Inc. a leading eCommerce software and service provider for midsized retailers, forms tight partnerships with retailers to build and operate highly-differentiated and profitable online retail businesses. MarketLive provides the technology, services and expertise that meets the needs of mid-market retailers with growing businesses. MarketLive, sites deliver a rich shopping experience, drive brand loyalty and build the retailers’ brands. MarketLive sites deliver optimal revenues and achieve higher overall business performance. MarketLive Intelligent Commerce, the industry’s first Commerce-as-a-Service offering, incorporates the company’s time-proven eCommerce acumen in three essential commerce areas: a hosted commerce platform, applied commerce strategy solutions and a powerful network of retailers, technology providers and experts.  

Challenge: MarketLive Retailers
Require Constant Availability and Performance
“Downtime for our customers’ web sites is not an option,” said Marty Boos, CIO of MarketLive. ”In order to fully support our customers in their online business strategies, we can absolutely never be down. Images, content, and all online information must be available at all times in order for them to receive optimal business results from the eCommerce initiatives.”

MarketLive had a primary storage solution using NetApp and Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) optimized SAN Storage that worked well. But since the threat of downtime and data loss is so detrimental to their business, they also needed a secondary storage solution they could fully rely on to sync all data and code in near real-time. Boos said that they needed a location for the application code and site content so that they could point their application servers to copy data and code on the storage solution. The tier-2 solution also needed to be able to quickly replicate any site issues in the test environment. They sought a solution that worked as well, or even better, than their primary solution but was less expensive.

“We looked at several solutions for our backup,” said Boos. “All hosted solutions were eliminated right away since we host over 160 sites ourselves and wanted the control. Other solutions, like EMC, were tossed out of the running because of their cost. They were way too expensive for our budget.”

MarketLive found Scale Computing, developer and manufacturer of Intelligent Clustered Storage (ICS) technology – a complete, end-to-end midmarket storage solution. Scale’s ICS technology aims to reduce costs while increasing control, as well as make storage management more convenient. ICS enables IT administrators to build out storage clusters, starting with just 3 usable terabytes up to the multiple petabyte range. By combining commodity hardware with a clustered file system commonly found only in the world’s largest supercomputers, a Scale storage cluster grows seamlessly while reducing costs by up to seventy-five percent compared to traditional enterprise storage solutions.

Solution
MarketLive began evaluating the SN1000 from Scale. The StarterSAN line of products with ICS provides enterprise-class, truly clustered storage features at a fraction of the price of comparable solutions. Because Scale’s ICS is a clustered rather than controller-based architecture, the Starter Cluster contains three nodes. This provides the redundancy and data protection needed in the rare event of drive or node failure. If a single node does fail, data is immediately re-replicated and another node seamlessly takes the load. ICS also preserves fast data access even during spiking workloads, and maintains the highest levels of system uptime.

After several months of thorough evaluation and testing, MarketLive implemented Scale’s ICS as their secondary storage solution – 3 SN1000’s with 3TB of useable storage. MarketLive is able to sync all of their data every six hours, or three times a day, from their primary storage solution to their new Scale solution. Each node adds additional through-put speeds, which make for an exceptionally fast and responsive storage system.

“It just works,” said Boos. “We are moving data each and every day with no issues. Scale works like they promised us it would – it works all day long.”

Benefits
Boos is already impressed with their Scale enterprise-class storage. In addition to peace of mind and continuous uptime, the Scale ICS solution has given MarketLive dramatic cost savings, the convenience of scalability and, enterprise-class storage control.

“With Scale, our new secondary storage solution performs just as well, if not better, than our primary solution – and at a much lower cost,” said Boos. “As we make plans to build out our disaster recovery center, we have decided to use Scale Computing as our main storage solution. The performance and price outweigh all other solutions we have evaluated. We saved 70 percent over the cost of our primary storage solution.”