eHarmony Finds Own Fulfillment as Web 2.0 Pioneer - ' Working Well Together ' (
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New system components work well together
All the new system components work seamlessly together, Douglas said.
"Buying 10-year-old storage technology doesnt work for us," Douglas said. "Weve had maybe 200 percent growth in traffic the last three years. The capabilities 3PAR and OnStor brought to the table were a no-brainer. Once you understand 3PARs architecture, the benefits are obvious and compelling."
3PARs and OnStors overall attitudes were forward-looking, Douglas said. "They understand what a relatively new, Web-based company like our needs."
eHarmonys mission-critical Web site, matchmaking application, payment processing and photo and profile servers are now supported by 3PAR arrays.
"Each of those storage arrays handles 30 terabytes of data," Douglas said. "Since we made the changeover, we found that we are quite happy with the performance—in reliability, speed, backup and scaling."
Douglas said he didnt want his people managing disk drives. "With 3PAR and OnStor, we dont have to set up and manage RAID groups," Douglas said.
Read more here about OnStors recent NAS offering.
"The system is self-managing and automatically balances I/O over every drive," Douglas said. "This lets us leverage the efficiency of RAID 5 liberally, and activities that would usually take a month to accomplish with traditional storage systems now require just a few minutes with 3PAR. That savings is huge for us."
Storage system consolidation more cost-effective
Consolidation is a preferred method for achieving a more cost-effective, shared storage resource, but many approaches to consolidation require special training and introduce additional complexity, said John McArthur, group vice president and general manager for Information Infrastructure Research at IDC in Framingham, Mass.
"Many companies lack the expertise to manage complex shared storage pools. But 3PARs Utility Storage platform, which enable consolidation and avoid introducing added complexity, are ideal for these companies," McArthur said.
eHarmony strives to bring IT projects to its market quickly while minimizing the cost of delivering and supporting those projects, Douglas said.
By consolidating its entire system into 3PAR Utility Storage, eHarmony was able to avoid costly incremental investment in IT expertise, including the need to hire a database administrator and a SAN administrator.
The reduction in storage complexity also freed existing administrative resources to pursue key growth projects, Douglas said.
eHarmony also uses 3PAR Virtual Copy for flexible and efficient array-based snapshots.
With 3PAR Virtual Copy, eHarmony has improved the availability of its mission-critical applications by taking hourly snapshots of all related databases.
eHarmonys IT department also retains these snapshots for up to a week to enable rapid recovery from multiple points in time.
They also perform non-disruptive, off-host backups of their databases from these snapshots, Douglas said.
Lastly, eHarmony was able to connect multiple host servers directly to each of its InServ Storage Servers, saving the company additional expenditures on redundant, switched SAN environments.
OnStor gateway capabilities
The OnStor NAS Gateways key benefits, as listed by the company, include:
Open storage: Customers can use the storage of your choice, including 3PAR, EMC, HDS, IBM, HP and others.
Continuously scalable performance: N-way clustering to 8 nodes.
Enterprise-class capacity management: Petabyte-scalable, plus automated provisioning.
Zero downtime: Designed for non-disruptive maintenance.
Complete Windows/UNIX/Linux interoperability: Native protocols
included.
For more information, see the 3PAR, OnStor and CommVault Web sites.
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