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CASE STUDY
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CASE STUDY:ATYPON SYSTEMS, INC
I am very happy to
work with SoftNAS and I have
proactively suggested to folks
that are looking for solutions to
consider SoftNAS.
SoftNAS™ Meets All the Functionality Requirements of Atypon® Systems
As one of the top Software as a Service content delivery providers, Atypon
helps publishers and media organizations compete in the business world.
Atypon’s ePublishing platform, Literatum, supports publishers with key
features such as advanced search and information discovery, reporting
and advertising. With RightSuite, Atypon’s access and e-commerce
solution, publishers and media organizations can monetize their content
and optimize revenue streams.
After trying multiple storage solutions, including their own home-built NFS
server, Atypon Systems now has a reliable storage solution that meets their
functionality requirements and is backed by an innovative support team.
Atypon now uses SoftNAS to handle its data recovery (DR) solution.
Existing Storage Solutions Fail to Meet Atypon’s Requirements
Atypon Systems, Inc is a software company that operates primarily on
a Software as a Service (SaaS) model. The company serves close to a
hundred customers, mainly in the scientific publishing sector and therefore
handles a large amount of data in their storage servers. Atypon has an
on-site data center in California, but recently took interest in increasing its
presence in the cloud.
Constantinos Karantzas, Atypon’s VP of Cloud Engineering, had three
basic requirements while searching for an NFS-based solution with fully
featured managed storage in Amazon Cloud: reliability, consistent uptime
(no downtime), and performance.
Before finding SoftNAS, Karantzas tried several other solutions such as
Amazon S3 and Gluster FS, but the existing solutions came with limitations
and didn’t meet Atypon’s standards. With Amazon S3, the write speeds
were too slow and Gluster FS was unable to scale up effectively to the
hundreds of millions of files Atypon has.
Constantinos Karantzas, Atypon’s VP of Cloud Engineering
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CASE STUDY:ATYPON SYSTEMS, INC
Another solution that Atypon attempted before SoftNAS was their own
home-built NFS server based on RAID 10. “But we always lacked the
features and functionality we were used to from our own storage server,”
said Karantzas. “For example, adding storage seamlessly, having snapshot
capability, being able to take writeable snapshots and substantiate them.
All those things were features that we care about very much.”
The Solution – A Reliable Full-Featured NAS in AWS
For Atypon, a fully featured managed storage system in Amazon Cloud
was a requirement. When Constantinos found SoftNAS, it met all of
Atypon’s functionality requirements. In June 2013, Atypon implemented
SoftNAS into their system, but the transition to SoftNAS wasn’t without
a few problems. “We found scalability problems, we found performance
problems,” said Karantzas. “But at the end, we had a common goal.”
That goal was to make SoftNAS a reliable and capable product that could
work for Atypon. Whenever Karantzas came upon issues, the SoftNAS
team was attentive and responsive with solutions. One such problem
involved the number of volumes Atypon could mount on a single EC2
instance in Amazon.
“We did not realize that it depends on how you use the naming structure
of the volumes,” said Karantzas. “You can be severely limited. At that point
I think we were around 20 volumes and we were done. Since we wanted
to grow our system substantially higher than that, SoftNAS worked with
Amazon, identified the issue, came up with a solution, and worked with us,
and we migrated our volumes to the new volume structure. And the whole
thing happened with zero data loss and [as] a fairly simple process.”
In November 2013, Atypon was able to begin using SoftNAS without
difficulties, giving the company access to a reliable NAS in Amazon Cloud
that is similar to their own on-site storage servers. Atypon now uses
SoftNAS to handle the data for Atypon’s Data Recovery (DR) solution.
[SoftNAS] allows us to
operate in the Amazon Cloud
in the same way we’re
operating in our data center.
It made the migration that
much smoother.
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CASE STUDY:ATYPON SYSTEMS, INC
I found the team is
both innovative and very
customer friendly.
The SoftNAS StorageCenter’s™ flexible and easy to manage storage
administration allows Atypon to configure new storage pools quickly and
effortlessly. The web-based interface is simple yet powerful and includes
the full spectrum of advanced capabilities that storage experts expect.
With SoftNAS SnapReplicate™, Atypon can use block replication to quickly
configure a complete replication and disaster recovery solution within
minutes without having to worry about slow write speeds.
SoftNAS’ multi-tier caching means that while RAM is automatically used
as high-speed cache, Atypon can also configure a second level read
cache with hundreds of GB of SSD or local ephemeral disks. RAID 10 with
RAM caching increases read performance up to 10,000 IOPS and SSD
caching can increase read performance to 50,000 or more IOPS. SoftNAS
also offers standard Linux-based identity management, so NFS files and
directory ownership and permissions operate as expected.
In addition to SoftNAS meeting Atypon’s technical requirements, the
SoftNAS support team has also been an integral part of Atypon’s
experience with SoftNAS.
“[The SoftNAS team is] not only knowledgeable, but inventive,” said
Karantzas. “Every person I interacted with, it was always a pleasure
working with that team. At the end of the day, people make the company...
And I had a very good experience working with everyone at SoftNAS.”
About SoftNAS
SoftNAS, LLC is a leading storage software company that provides Simply
Powerful™ agile storage software that protects mission-critical data
in the cloud. SoftNAS believes that storage can be both powerful and
frictionless, providing customers with the enterprise-grade NAS storage
capabilities required to safely and reliably operate mission-critical IT
systems and applications in the cloud. SoftNAS supports the most popular
cloud computing platforms, including Amazon Web Services®, Microsoft®
and VMware®. www.softnas.com
[The SoftNAS team]
is number one. It is not
only knowledgeable, but very
inventive.
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CASE STUDY:ATYPON SYSTEMS, INC
Every person I’ve
interacted with, it was always
a pleasure working with that
team. At the end of the day,
people make the company
and I had a very good
experience working with
everybody at SoftNAS.
– Constantinos Karantzas, VP of Cloud Engineering
Atypon Systems, Inc
About Atypon
Atypon delivers innovative solutions that revolutionize the way publishers
and media organizations do business. Literatum, Atypon’s flagship
ePublishing platform, provides all of the functionality that publishers
need to compete in the digital world, including advanced search and
information discovery, access control, e-commerce, advertising and
reporting. Literatum hosts more than 17 million journal articles, 100,000
eBooks, and many other types of scientific and scholarly content for
leading publishers worldwide. Atypon’s RightSuite offers an access and
e-commerce solution that enables publishers and media organizations to
monetize their digital content, experiment with new business models and
optimize revenue streams.
Atypon Info
Web: www.atypon.com
Headquarters: Santa Clara, CA, USA
Industry: ePublishing and e-commerce
SoftNAS customer: Since 2013
Need: Needed a full featured managed storage solution in Amazon Cloud
The Solution: Reliable SoftNAS in AWS
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