3par Powers Black Friday and Cyber Monday Campaigns

3par, Inc. announced that LinkShare Corporation, provider of full-service online marketing solutions, has deployed 3PAR InServ Storage Servers in its virtual datacenter to support increased activity during the peak holiday shopping season.

LinkShare chose multi-tiered InServ arrays to handle heavy traffic over ‘Black Friday’ and ‘Cyber Monday’ at a lower total cost than is possible with traditional storage. By choosing 3PAR Utility Storage over legacy arrays, LinkShare was able to save $150-200K per year on administration costs while also cutting datacenter footprint and power consumption by 50%.

The InServ arrays installed at LinkShare have nearly tripled storage performance. Autonomic storage management capabilities that intelligently and dynamically distribute workloads across array resources have reduced storage administration time while delivering ‘hands-off’ quality of service level optimization.

"Seasonal spikes in traffic such as the Black Friday to Cyber Monday window are a challenge for our datacenter," said Lee Revell, Systems Administrator at LinkShare. "However, this year we calculated that we could have easily handled twice the load due to our 3PAR InServs."

With customers like Apple iTunes, Netflix, and Walmart, LinkShare routinely experiences increased traffic during the holiday shopping season as advertising campaigns increase to several million along with an uptick in the number of campaign reports being run. For example, an affiliate that typically runs campaign reports once a week throughout the year might increase this frequency to once a day during the holiday season.

3PAR InServ arrays have not just helped LinkShare meet these increased performance demands, but have also made it easy and painless to scale their environment. Designed to scale massively and non-disruptively, LinkShare’s InServ arrays handle capacity expansions simply and without downtime which would be particularly difficult to accommodate during peak periods such as the holiday shopping season. After adding capacity, LinkShare uses 3PAR Dynamic Optimization software to autonomically restripe existing volumes across new disks for optimized performance without actively managing quality of service levels and without impacting production workloads.

"With 3PAR, when we add another shelf of drives, we can automatically restripe data without any downtime," said Revell. "The superior technology of 3PAR Utility Storage allows us to run a few commands on our InServ arrays and then forget about them."

With 3PAR, LUN provisioning that used to take up to an hour has been reduced to 5-10 minutes per LUN, a greater than 80% reduction in provisioning time. The ease of management of the InServ platform has enabled LinkShare to avoid hiring an additional administrator to manage their environment, amounting to a savings of $150-200K per year.

Other significant benefits for LinkShare include cost and power savings made possible with 3PAR Thin Provisioning. For LinkShare’s business, capacity needs for new clients are inherently unpredictable, and previously required that LinkShare purchase more storage up-front than its clients actually required in the end. With 3PAR Thin Provisioning, this is not necessary since physical storage is allocated only as it is actually required for written data. This increased efficiency, coupled with the superior density of their InServ arrays, has allowed LinkShare to not only save money on up-front storage purchases, but to halve its datacenter size and power requirements for additional operational savings.

"LinkShare has built solutions that offer a more engaging shopping experience for consumers and more profitable relationships between advertisers and publishers, especially during peak shopping periods like the Black Friday to Cyber Monday window," said David Scott, 3PAR President and CEO. "At 3PAR we have built a storage platform with the kind of agility and efficiency that is well-suited to meeting the unpredictable needs of an online business like LinkShare’s."