Squarespace Transforms Website Publishing With Isilon IQ

Isilon Systems announced that Squarespace, a provider of website publishing and online content management software, has deployed Isilon IQ as the central repository for its entire collection of user-generated content including images, html code, and other file-based data. Squarespace provides a powerful platform enabling bloggers, small businesses and corporations to build optimized, feature-packed websites without complex design or management limitations. Currently attracting more than 15 million unique visitors per month, Squarespace uses Isilon clustered storage to unify its rapidly growing library of user-generated content onto a single, highly scalable, high performance shared pool of storage, enabling the immediate, concurrent data access necessary to reliably power its website publishing operations.

Example of a site shared on Squarespace platform

"At Squarespace, we make the complex simple, whether it be setting up a dynamic blog from a home computer or running a corporate website with millions of views per month. To satisfy such a wide range of user requirements and data access patterns, we need a storage solution with true ease of use and pay-as-you-grow scalability to streamline our workflow and manage our data growth, all with minimal investment of time and resources," said Anthony Casalena, Founder, Squarespace. "Not only is Isilon drop dead simple to use and scale, but it also performs incredibly well. We couldn’t be more pleased with our investment."

Squarespace empowers individuals, corporations and governments to host, design, create and control content on the Web. With a robust set of easy to use web authoring tools, users can create highly compelling websites in a matter of minutes, opening up the Internet as a publishing medium for everyone from individuals to businesses. As a result, Squarespace’s business has more than doubled in size in each of the last five years.

To power its always-on operations and ensure user data is immediately accessible 24x7x365, Squarespace requires a storage solution that removes the data access limitations and performance bottlenecks common with traditional, scale up storage architectures. With Isilon IQ, Squarespace has centralized its entire operation onto a reliable, immediately available central storage repository, accelerating user data access and significantly reducing IT cost and complexity. Additionally, using Isilon’s SyncIQ asynchronous data replication software, Squarespace is able to seamlessly back-up user-generated data to a second Isilon cluster for disaster recovery, providing unmatched reliability for the Squarespace platform.

"As the Internet continues to transform modern day communication, innovative companies are delivering leading-edge software services to meet increasing consumer and business demand for robust, easy-to-use website publishing and online content management solutions," said Steve Fitz, Senior Vice President of Worldwide Field Operations, Isilon Systems. "Squarespace is at the forefront of this next wave of software as a service providers harnessing the power of the Internet for a wide spectrum of online applications, including everything from personal blogging to corporate communications."

Powered by OneFS, Isilon IQ X-Series delivers the industry’s first single file system that unifies and provides instant and ubiquitous access to the rapidly growing stores of file-based data, setting the standard for scale out file storage. OneFS is a unified operating system software layer that powers all of Isilon’s award-winning IQ family of clustered storage systems including the Isilon IQ 1920, 3000, 6000, 9000, 12000, Accelerator-x, and EX 6000, 9000 and 12000. Isilon also provides a robust suite of software applications including SnapshotIQ, SmartConnect, SmartQuotas, and SyncIQ that leverage OneFS and clustered storage, providing the highest levels of data protection and automated data management.