WhereToLive.com With Fluid Data Storage From Compellent

Compellent Technologies, Inc. announced its customer WhereToLive.com has implemented a Fluid Data architecture that helped the real-estate Web development firm significantly improve its storage efficiency, productivity and scalability.

WhereToLive.com found that as real-estate brokers in the United States and Canada expanded their online presence, the increasing number of property listings created unique storage management and scalability challenges. Using Compellent’s intelligent, active management of data to lower costs and quickly adapt to changing business demands, WhereToLive.com has kept storage expenses in check with 90 percent of its data on lower-cost drives and delayed disk purchases for more than a year.

"As the first-time homebuyer’s tax credit warms buyers back into the market, real estate brokers are turning to leading technology providers to deliver the online tools that will set them apart with these more proactive shoppers," said Bruce Kornfeld, vice president of marketing, Compellent. "Fluid Data storage allows WheretoLive.com to deliver new capabilities to their clients by automatically and efficiently flowing data where needed to better serve their customers."

Compellent’s dynamic architecture has allowed WhereToLive.com to improve business continuity and boost efficiency through superior storage utilization and management. Frequently used information, like new or popular property listings, reside on the top tier of high-speed Fibre Channel storage while aging data rapidly moves to lower-cost SATA drives without any intervention. Through the scalability, agility and ease-of-use of Compellent storage, WhereToLive.com evolved its storage environment alongside the business, including recently expanding its data capacity by three times the size in about 30 minutes without downtime.

"We manage hundreds of thousands of files and even more digital images for our customers, and having the ability to manage the data changes with each client’s transaction without disruption or downtime has been invaluable," said Ben Higginbotham, director of new technologies at WhereToLive.com. "By using Compellent’s fluid technology, I can build the smartest system that automatically uses the right storage at the right time, and we can store infinitely more data at a price that’s actually reasonable."

Compellent’s Fluid Data storage helps eliminates the scalability challenges and dead-end growth paths common with other storage platforms that cannot be as easily expanded or upgraded. By infusing its enterprise storage system with built-in automation and intelligence, Compellent enables data to flow throughout an organization in a way that is directly aligned with the needs of the business. As a result, business applications are implemented faster, information to make decisions is constantly available, new technologies are quickly deployed, and data is automatically secured against downtime and disaster.