Webtrends Scales Out Virtual Data Center With Isilon

Isilon Systems, Inc. announced that Webtrends, which founded the web analytics industry in 1993, has deployed Isilon scale-out storage to power its development environments.

Using Isilon’s X-Series in combination with VMWare vSphere, Webtrends has consolidated more than 700 virtual servers onto a single file system, simplifying storage management and eliminating the data fragmentation and low resource utilization common with traditional SAN and NAS in virtual environments. With Isilon, Webtrends has improved the performance, utilization and management of its virtual servers, maximizing its investment in virtualization, while reducing IT operating costs.

"As we scaled our business to meet increasing demand, virtualization presented a clear path to improved efficiency and agility," said Josh Wisely, systems engineer, Webtrends. "However, it created a management nightmare for our previous storage system. With Isilon, that’s no longer an issue – management is simple, application performance is up and we’re utilizing resources more efficiently. Plus, with Isilon’s new iSCSI capability, I can manage both file- and block-level applications from one, easy-to-use file system."

Webtrends provides insight-driven optimization of digital channels for thousands of leading brands including Microsoft, Toyota, The Coca-Cola Company, The New York Times and General Mills. Prior to deploying Isilon scale-out storage, Webtrends didn’t have a central, shared storage resource capable of scaling in-step with its growing virtual server environment, which limited application performance and complicated both storage and virtual server management.  

By deploying Isilon’s X-Series, featuring its OneFS operating system, Webtrends has created a single file system and single volume for its entire virtual server infrastructure, simplifying data management to accelerate application performance and reduce overhead. With Isilon’s unique clustered architecture, Webtrends can linearly scale performance and capacity in-line with demand, providing its virtual servers with multi-path I/O to optimize performance and utilization.

Leveraging Isilon’s unified, multi-protocol access for both file- and block-level data, Webtrends has consolidated its NFS-based virtual servers and iSCSI-based Microsoft cluster database on a single, shared storage resource, further simplifying its IT infrastructure to increase operating efficiency. Using InsightIQ, Webtrends can monitor performance trends for its virtual servers, enabling the web analytics leader to easily align storage resources with user needs. Additionally, as Isilon enables seamless integration of new storage nodes into an existing system without any downtime, Webtrends can scale out its system as business needs to maximize return on investment.

"Having pioneered the web analytics industry, Webtrends long ago established itself as an IT visionary," said Sam Grocott, vice president of marketing, Isilon. "Today they’re extending their leadership by leveraging Isilon in combination with VMware to maximize IT operating efficiency and increase business agility."