Envoy Media Group Selects Gluster

Gluster, Inc. announced that Envoy Media Group, Inc., a multi-media marketing firm, has chosen Gluster to provide a reliable storage solution for its content delivery platform running entirely on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Envoy offers its customers highly-targeted, carefully tracked media campaigns across multiple media channels including television, radio, the Internet, direct video and more. These campaigns have very unpredictable demand patterns that require a responsive infrastructure that provides high availability. Envoy uses automated tools to rapidly scale media servers to meet demand and relies on Gluster to provide high availability of the data in a shared storage pool on Amazon Elastic Block Storage (EBS). Gluster uses software replication to ensure data is on-line even in the event of a hardware failure, and delivers the performance required even when demand spikes.

"With its easy-to-use interface, high availability and scalability we have been able to deliver our organization with a much more reliable storage system than we had in the past. And, because Gluster is POSIX compliant we did not need to make any changes to our existing infrastructure," said Michael Taggart, chief technology officer at Envoy Media Group. "We’re solving our storage problem with open source software and are not letting the hardware dictate how we operate or design applications, and in terms of addressing our storage requirements Gluster was the only solution on the market that allowed us to tie the storage pieces together in a way that met all of our needs."

Before moving to AWS, Envoy housed their IT infrastructure in a co-location facility that often presented administrative challenges. Responding to demand spikes was much more difficult and required time consuming manual file copying and load balancing. The move to AWS solved the agility issues, but also required the storage solution to reliably support dynamic scaling. Envoy deployed Gluster across multiple EBS volumes, presenting a shared pool that all media servers could access – even if hundreds of new media servers were brought on-line within a few minutes. Gluster performs automatic load balancing and eliminates issues such as manual file copying and limitations on file access across media servers. In addition, Gluster was easy to install and only requires one system administrator to manage the technology. Combined with the other operational cost savings with the move to AWS, Envoy has been able to allocate resources to revenue generating activities rather than administration.

"Envoy adopted Gluster to gain greater flexibility, take advantage of pay-as-you-go pricing, and lower operational costs while simultaneously ensuring their media assets are always available to their clients," said Ben Golub, CEO of Gluster. "Gluster has been able to deliver on the promise that our technology offers these benefits in addition to being easy to use and deploy on public cloud infrastructure."

To read the Envoy case study