NetApp Helps Gorilla Nation

NetApp announced today that online advertising firm Gorilla Nation, through its deployment of NetApp storage systems, has reduced its management and infrastructure costs, improved flexibility, and increased overall business efficiencies. Gorilla Nation also deployed the NetApp Performance Acceleration Module (PAM) to increase performance and accelerate the response time of its mission-critical applications.

Gorilla Nation is the world’s largest online advertising sales firm, representing leading Web publishers and offering integrated media and promotional programs to Fortune 500 brand advertisers. After years of growth both organically and through acquisition, Gorilla Nation’s storage environment had become difficult to manage and lacked the essential tools needed to scale across the network.

Gorilla Nation selected NetApp to build a centralized storage environment that fully leveraged the company’s entire application infrastructure. Gorilla Nation transitioned from locally attached storage to consolidated NetApp FAS systems, including the FAS3170. Gorilla Nation chose the FAS3170 for its demonstrated performance on the company’s targeted workload and its flexibility with NetApp Data ONTAP as a unified storage architecture. Equally important to Gorilla Nation was having a storage network that maximized performance. The NetApp PAM allowed Gorilla Nation the ability to reduce latency and increase throughput without adding additional disk drives, therefore eliminating additional power, cooling, and space costs.

“For us to remain competitive as a leader within the internet ad industry, it is imperative that our technology works efficiently, has high availability, and exceeds traditional performance standards,” said Alex Godelman, vice president of Technology at Gorilla Nation. “We partnered with NetApp because it offered the best centralized storage environment with top-notch performance that fully leverages our entire application infrastructure. NetApp is essential to our business success.”

“With today’s tight IT budgets, it’s more critical than ever to get the most performance from every investment while keeping power, cooling, and space requirements down,” said Patrick Rogers, vice president, Solutions Marketing at NetApp. “The Performance Acceleration Module provides customers like Gorilla Nation, with higher throughput results without having to resort to buying more disk spindles to support a given workload, or having to implement exclusively with expensive 15K RPM drives. In addition, the PAM module draws significantly less power than these other two alternatives.”

The NetApp PAM, which Gorilla Nation runs on its FAS3170s, is an intelligent read cache that offers a new way to optimize the performance of a NetApp storage system for workloads that are random read intensive. The NetApp PAM provides users with an alternative to adding disk drives as a means of increasing throughput and reducing latency. This module fits into existing NetApp storage systems, so it uses no additional rack space and consumes 95% less power than a shelf of Fibre Channel disk drives. The PAM allows users to grow cost-effectively and without straining infrastructures.

NetApp fabric-attached storage (FAS) systems are a broad family of compatible storage systems, built upon a unified storage architecture offering business agility, superior application uptime, simplicity of management, and low total cost of ownership.