Demand Media has Chosen 3PAR Utility Storage

3PAR announced that Web 2.0 social media company Demand Media, Inc. has chosen 3PAR Utility Storage to support its rapidly growing social media business. Demand Media uses its network of vertically-oriented Web properties to connect content creators and large audiences with advertisers. To improve infrastructure agility, storage scalability, and capacity utilization over the data lifecycle, the social media company has implemented multiple 3PAR InServ Storage Servers in addition to 3PAR Thin Provisioning and 3PAR Dynamic Optimization software. Demand Media has also chosen to deploy an entire virtual datacenter based on the 3cV blueprint, which combines 3PAR Utility Storage with products from HP and VMware to create a complete utility computing environment.

Demand Media’s previous storage environment lacked flexibility and was difficult to scale in response to rapid business growth. By implementing highly-virtualized, tightly-clustered 3PAR arrays, the social media company has been able to keep up with rapid and unpredictable growth without complex administration and disruptive reconfiguration activities.

"3PAR provides an easy-to-use, agile, highly-virtualized, and scalable storage platform for our database and VMware environment," said Rich Brownlee, Director of Systems Engineering for Demand Media. "With 3PAR Utility Storage and 3PAR Thin Provisioning, we can now grow our storage environment easily and with complete confidence to meet the needs of our rapidly growing social media content business."

The owner of Websites such as eHow.com, GreenCar.com, and LIVESTRONG.com, Demand Media provides an interactive, personalized, and vertically-focused media experience to over 65 million unique users. Using proprietary social media tools and the unique distribution platform of the world’s second-largest domain registrar, Demand Media connects content creators and audiences to grow its network of vertically-oriented Web properties.

Due to the rapid expansion of its business, Demand Media found that storage scalability and flexible, easy database and storage management were becoming critical requirements. To keep up with growth, Demand Media determined that it needed to enhance its server and storage infrastructure. The social media company promptly sought out a highly-virtualized server and storage platform that would enable greater flexibility and scalability than their previous infrastructure. They ultimately decided to implement 3PAR Utility Storage and a complete virtual datacenter based on the 3cV blueprint. ‘3cV’ stands for the combination of the 3PAR InServ Storage Server, HP BladeSystem c-Class, and VMware Infrastructure. These elements combine to form a complete utility computing environment that has enabled customers to halve server, storage, and operational costs and gain instant agility.

"Web 2.0 companies are increasingly looking for more cost-effective ways to scale due to unpredictable and rapidly growing data storage requirements," said Anne MacFarland, Director of I. T. Architectures and Strategies at The Clipper Group, Inc., technology acquisition consultants. "3PAR Utility Storage and its 3cV blueprint provide the agility, flexibility, and scalability required by a dynamic and growing Web 2.0 business."

To support their virtual datacenter, Demand Media chose to deploy the 3PAR InServ S800 Storage Server with 188 terabytes of storage and two 3PAR InServ E200 Storage Servers with 36 terabytes of storage. Demand Media’s 3PAR deployment also utilizes several 3PAR software products including 3PAR Thin Provisioning, 3PAR Dynamic Optimization, 3PAR Virtual Copy, and 3PAR System Reporter.

3PAR software products give Demand Media’s storage infrastructure the following advantages:

• 3PAR Thin Provisioning has enabled Demand Media to virtually eliminate imprecise capacity planning and become significantly more efficient and responsive to the rapid growth of their social media business. 3PAR Thin Provisioning permits the one-time allocation of virtual capacity while consuming physical capacity only for written data, thus dramatically cutting capacity and related costs while alleviating substantial storage and system administration.
• 3PAR Dynamic Optimization gives Demand Media the ability to change data service levels with a single command — online and non-disruptively. This includes the ability to convert between RAID levels and supported drive types (Fibre Channel and Enterprise-class Serial ATA) to provide high capacity utilization levels while preserving the high levels of performance that Demand Media requires.
• 3PAR Virtual Copy allows Demand Media to create efficient copies of its Microsoft SQL Server databases through an innovative snapshot technology that requires no up-front space reservations. With Virtual Copy, Demand Media is also able to revert to any previously created snapshot with a single command in order to quickly recover their SQL databases.
• 3PAR System Reporter is a simple-to-use, Web-based performance and capacity management tool designed to aggregate historical system data for one or more 3PAR arrays. System Reporter is ideally suited for troubleshooting, planning, monitoring, and providing information required for Service Level Agreements and chargeback support. Demand Media has used the trend reporting statistics available through System Reporter to help troubleshoot and isolate application performance issues quickly in order to minimize business impact.

"Demand Media is one of many Web 2.0 companies re-evaluating their storage environments to prepare for high levels of growth," said David Scott, CEO and President of 3PAR. "We are very pleased that they have selected 3PAR Utility Storage to support their new virtual datacenter and their rapidly growing SQL Server database environment."