Red Envelope
Launched in 1999, RedEnvelope's mission is to make gift
giving—no matter what the occasion or circumstance—simple and fun. RedEnvelope showcases a variety of
items to its customers, including bath and body products,
jewelry, clothes, cigars, gadgets, and sports items.
Visitors
also have the ability to browse the web site by occasion,
whether it is a birthday, wedding, housewarming,
congratulatory gift, or otherwise. Through a unique
assortment of gifts, its easy-to-use Web site and seasonal
catalogs, RedEnvelope offers a shopping experience
that's inspired, modern, and convenient.
Challenge
The demands of their busy Web site, including the management of countless customer records and files, prompted
RedEnvelope to look for an agile storage system with leading reliability that would keep total cost of ownership (TCO)
to a minimum.
The company found its Direct-attached storage (DAS) system could not efficiently scale, and the TCO
was significantly higher than what RedEnvelope's IT budget
could sustain. As a result, the company decided to search
for a new storage system that better met its needs.
Solution
RedEnvelope IT Director Dale Emel was tasked with updating
RedEnvelope's storage systems and examined three different vendors: EMC, NetApp, and Pillar Data Systems®. After
researching each of these company's offerings, Emel and a
team of RedEnvelope's IT managers decided to implement
the Pillar Axiom® storage system.
Why Pillar?
Scalability — Axiom consolidates multiple tiers
of enterprise network storage into a single, easily
managed system capable of scaling to hundreds
of terabytes of capacity. Adding more Brick storage
enclosures increases capacity without additional
licensing fees.
Ease of Management — From installation to ongoing administrative tasks, Axiom enables users to
create volumes and manage storage with ease.
Performance tuning and capacity optimization is
essentially eliminated with the Axiom. Moreover,
simplified management of a single system for multiple applications minimizes time spent provisioning
and maintaining the system.
QoS — Axiom uses QoS technology to allocate system resources and handle each data flow according
to its business priority. With a simple management interface, IT managers can provision different classes
of service within a single system, aligning storage
resources with the business value of each data type
and application.
Results
RedEnvelope immediately recognized the many
benefits of deploying the Axiom system. With Pillar,
RedEnvelope has the ability to quickly and easily scale
capacity to keep pace with its rapid growth. The team
also found the Pillar Axiom to be very simple to configure and maintain.
According to RedEnvelope, Pillar
is the most flexible and efficient storage system in
the market today, featuring unique Quality of Service
(QoS) capabilities, through its AxiomONETM Dynamic
Performance Manager. Pillar pioneered storage QoS,
or the ability to assign varied data priority levels within
the storage system.
Among the key factors in the decision were the flexibility, overall ease of use, and efficiency of the Axiom
system. Pillar's solution also delivered a lower TCO,
allowing RedEnvelope to grow and attract new customers without major impact to its IT budget.
RedEnvelope deployed two Axiom 500 systems, with
7.5 terabytes of storage on each unit. To increase storage capacity at the beginning of 2007 they upgraded
to 11 TB on each Axiom and added NAS capability.
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North America
