Picture-perfect storage

Communications News, May, 2004

Storing high volumes of date-intensive photo images and making them instantly accessible was a growing challenge for photo.net, as this 10-year-old online photo service swelled to nearly 300,000 subscribers. photo.net, which connects high-end amateur and professional photographers around the world through its galleries of member-contributed photos, discussion forums and photo resources, needed a new reference date-storage system to accommodate a minimum of 10 million Web site hits per day.

The new storage system would have to scale easily to meet the company's expected 100% growth of archived photo images in the coming year. The company's collection of photo images requires considerable storage space, more than that needed to store other types of reference data. photo.net needed an efficient and reliable means to back up and retrieve images.

An important consideration was reliability, according to Rajeev Surati, chairman and president, because customers place a high value on their photos. A redundant storage system would provide greater reliability than just a simple backup. IT costs, however, especially storage expenses, had to be contained to offer competitive pricing.

Incremental growth capability is important Surati explains, because as the volume of stored reference information grows, the company must expand storage capability without incurring the downtime required to migrate to new software or hardware. Equally important is replication of data on multiple servers in the photo.net environment for added protection to keep images safe. These data-intensive storage requirements propelled the company to a solution that makes efficient use of the storage capacity, while enabling fast response time.

With these requirements established, photo.net evaluated several options, including those from Permabit in Cambridge. Mass., whose Permeon software enables scalable and cost-efficient mid-tier storage for fixed content, reference and archival information. The software requires no changes to existing applications and scales from work group to enterprise levels.

The software can reduce storage capacity needs by up to 95% and runs on standard non-proprietary servers, lowering total cost of ownership, and claims savings of up to 50% over competitive content-addressed storage (CAS) offerings. It also provides nearline access to growing volumes of reference information previously hidden away on tape or optical storage.

A CAS system assigns each block of date a unique content address based on its actual content. Content addresses enable fault tolerance, data verification, load balancing and data coalescence for increased storage efficiency. With date coalescence, only changed date is saved, thus reducing storage capacity needs and lowering costs.

Because the software is easily expanded, photo.net can add storage servers one at a time to meet now capacity demands. Flexible choices of industry-standard hardware have allowed the company to lower operational costs. In addition, Permeon's block-level data coalescence, which reduces disk usage by eliminating unnecessary data redundancy, has addressed the requirement for efficient use of disk storage, and let the company purchase less storage capacity than other solutions would have required.

Surati evaluated other CAS solutions and estimates that the software cost photo.net 20% less than its previous storage solution and was the only option that offered such cost savings. "Other types of storage alternatives were less reliable and required considerable staff time to manage," notes Surati. "We would have to purchase system elements from several vendors and cobble them together in order to obtain the features we needed."

The software integrated seamlessly and quickly with the photo.net environment, fitting in with existing administrative methods and tools. Because of the industry-standard hardware and interfaces (NFS and CIFS) that Permeon supports, Surati was able to effortlessly run his existing software applications: there was no need to write costly custom software or change the existing environment.

Today, the software is used for both backup and primary storage of photo.net's images. The software runs on a cluster of four networked storage servers, linked to photo.net's 15 front-end Web servers. The company uses one terabyte of storage to back up its system and run as primary storage. Other components of the photo.net IT environment include Oracle 8i, Red Hat Linux on ASA, servers and Sun servers running Solaris.

Surati estimates photo.net recovered its full investment during a single date loss event, caused by operator error. Because the date was retrieved quickly, the company's Web site did not have to be out of operation for hours, which could have meant significant lost revenues.

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