HomeAway Selects Cache IQ

Cache IQ, Inc., in NAS acceleration, announced today that HomeAway, Inc., in online marketplace of vacation rentals, has selected the RapidCache NAS caching appliance to accelerate file access in both its Austin, TX and London, UK data centers.

To maintain a constantly evolving product portfolio, HomeAway has a dynamic, private cloud development environment running on NAS. As this environment and the number of developers grew, the volume of NFS file operations sometimes overloaded the filers’ CPU and internal cache and caused slowdowns, even though there was plenty of storage capacity remaining.

Faced with an expensive filer upgrade, HomeAway evaluated RapidCache from Cache IQ. By caching in the network and offloading work from the filers, RapidCache flattened the performance spikes and extended the life of the filers by at least a year. HomeAway now plans to connect RapidCache to its production filers providing a tiered caching strategy for key services in their SOA stack that rely on consistent NAS performance.

"HomeAway’s business is built on delivering a superior user experience," says Steve Davis, SVP of Technology and Operations for HomeAway. "We believe layered caching is the right architectural approach–in the content delivery network, data services, back-end storage, and now in the storage network with RapidCache. Moreover, the economics of a network-based cache are compelling because we can now move a high volume of image data to cheaper SATA drives and still deliver optimal performance."

An unexpected benefit has been the visibility RapidCache provides into NFS file operations by HomeAway users and applications via the integrated RapidView administration and monitoring web application.

Senior storage engineer Jason Greene says: "For the first time, I can see exactly what files are being accessed by what client, which is enormously helpful for troubleshooting problems in real time. It also assists with capacity planning and data placement decisions."

Cache IQ CEO, Joel Trammell, states: "We are thrilled to add a household name like HomeAway to our growing list of marquis customers. As an innovator and market leader, HomeAway’s decision to deploy RapidCache is great validation of Cache IQ’s unique approach to NAS acceleration. We look forward to a long and productive relationship."