Zadara Storage, Realty Data team up for AWS storage answer

CALIFORNIA: Zadara Storage, Inc. has announced that together with cloud consulting and managed services provider RightBrain Networks, it has enabled Realty Data Company, LLC, to deploy a massive enterprise Storage as a Service (STaaS) architecture.

Designed for repository storage at Amazon Web Services (AWS), this installation typifies the greater performance, agility, scalability and cost savings possible by the right software-designed storage approaches - even at Big Data scale, says the announcement.

Realty Data had grown to the point that its existing on-premises EMC SAN would not scale cost-effectively, and moving its over 800 million image files to native Amazon storage options such as EBS and S3 proved problematic. The company then turned to RightBrain Networks, which helped it switch to Zadara Storage's Virtual Private Storage Array (VPSA) and achieve its business goals at AWS without compromise.

"We were skeptical at first about an architecture going from one data center to another to pull up images, especially at our scale; but with the combination of AWS compute resource and Zadara Storage that RightBrain helped us build and deploy, we're getting better performance than what we had from an on-premise EMC SAN, and saving at least 50 per cent of our data center costs," said Craig Loop, director of technology at Realty Data Corp. "Following the migration, instead of getting complaints, we actually had customers stating that they noticed a performance increase in our system. We now have flexibility and agility to try new approaches as we grow our business, without having to plan and buy the storage we need to run them."

As shared: Realty Data made the decision to move its data center to the cloud and consolidate three EMC SANs into one unified cloud-based architecture at AWS for cost control and scalability reasons.. It chose AWS' EC2 for its exceptional compute resources, but storage quickly proved problematic. EBS was expensive and its 1 TB per volume size limit made it not feasible for a large volume of data. Amazon's S3 object storage wasn't compatible with the more I/O intensive, block-level storage needed by Realty Data's application. Even though most of the application data are small image files, the sheer volume of hundreds of millions of them--and the need to access them with the same immediacy that its customers have grown to expect from an on-premises data center resource--ratchets up architectural complexities. As a result RightBrain Networks turned to Zadara Storage, whose enterprise-grade features promised a different way for Realty Data.

The result was that Realty Data's application transformed the downsides of on-premises storage - costs, complexity, staffing, scalability challenges, inflexibility - into exactly what excelled in the storage architecture. Because Zadara's enterprise VPSA can scale to nearly 1 billion files, all in one large pool instead of the 1 TB volume size limitation of AWS's EBS, Realty Data could architect its storage so that it would not need the AWS EC2 server to act as a data manager using 60 individual 1 TB EBS volumes. Working in support of Realty Data, RightBrain Networks' site reliability engineers could directly map Realty Data's storage onto a network drive attached to an instance and deliver an image with almost zero latency.

Instead of needing sizable capital outlays for traditional storage hardware/software and the need for a dedicated hire to manage just the storage alone, Realty Data could simply scale up or down its storage resources elastically from a dedicated management interface with the click of a button. Instead of accepting less I/O performance in exchange for agility, or provisioning adequately yet consuming CapEx and staffing budgets, Realty Data's system delivered superior storage performance on demand, without the heat, cooling, floor space and staffing hours, the announcement explained.

Notably, Realty Data is a property information solutions provider to the mortgage and insurance industry that serves up land surveys, titles and other documents used in real estate transactions.