Webtrends_cs_fnl (page 1)
C A S E S T U D Y
I N T E R N E T S E R V I C E S
BlueArc’s Titan helps WebTrends reduce
costs and management overhead.
More conversions. Less meetings.
WebTrends, the global leader in Web analytics, counts on BlueArc Titan storage systems to
“We have thousands of enterprise
store and manage real-time, on-demand Web statistics from thousands of enterprise Web sites
customers with millions of hits per day.”
simultaneously. With uncompromising performance and scalability, BlueArc has enabled the
company to consolidate dozens of disparate servers and simplify its infrastructure.
“We were looking for space, and
The Background
performance to keep up.”
WebTrends is the worldwide, market-share leader and trusted standard for Web analytics.
Thousands of organizations worldwide, including more than half of the Fortune and Global
“We had to get something that could
500 companies, rely on WebTrends to help them improve their return on investment, from
scale in a different way. That was the
campaign performance and search engine marketing, to Web site conversion and customer
differentiation in BlueArc’s Titan, with
retention.
its modular architecture that could scale
The company’s Web analytics platform-WebTrends 7-is available through both hosted,
with us, and avoid a forklift upgrade.”
on-demand and software options, to ensure the solution can adapt to customers’ changing
business and technical requirements. The hosted service, WebTrends On Demand, offers
“There are a number of benefits –
redundant data collection, co-location of data centers and an unmatched staging environment
simplicity and the reduction of
for quality control of customer data.
complexity. Greater reliability. Not so
many moving parts. Being able to grow
The Challenge
the service without a proportional
First launched in 1999, WebTrends’ hosted offering quickly attracted thousands of enterprise
growth in headcount.”
customers who rely on the service for real-time, around-the-clock tracking of their Web site
statistics, trends and visitor behaviors. As the popularity of the service increased, WebTrends’
- Dustin Harris, principal systems
infrastructure team evaluated the increasing capacity and high performance requirements.
It rapidly became clear that adding servers with direct attached storage would not be the
engineer for WebTrends
most cost-effective solution to support future business growth – as these servers tended to
reach performance capacity even while total storage capacity had not reached its limits.
The company decided to find a storage system that would better support its on-going business
growth. It wanted a system that could handle its 24x7 traffic load around the world as well as
consolidate its file services.
The Solution
WebTrends wanted to centralize its disparate storage behind a single, high performance platform
that could scale in-line with both the company’s rapid growth and the increased demand for
its hosted services. It investigated several networked storage offerings, including those featuring
either a storage area network (SAN) or NAS in front of a SAN. In the end, the company
chose BlueArc’s Titan due to its unique, highly scalable product architecture.
C A S E S T U D Y
I N T E R N E T S E R V I C E S
WebTrends Environment
While helping WebTrends to reduce costs and management
On Demand Web Analytics
overhead tied to the WebTrends On Demand storage infrastructure,
BlueArc’s Titan is also expected to help defer future capacity
purchases. Thanks to Titan’s ease of management and ability to
simplify the WebTrends On Demand infrastructure, the company
has been able to avoid spiraling expense cost. It has also developed
a new comfort in Titan’s ability to remain the core storage platform
at the heart of its production systems.
Previous servers used to reach their performance ceiling well below
their advertised capacity limits. In contrast, Titan has not wavered
under heavy traffic loads – including the 2004 holiday season,
which saw record traffic for a number of WebTrends customers.
As WebTrends continues to grow, the company also no longer
needs to plan for system replacements in order to grow the storage
“We had to get something that could scale in a different way,” said
along with it. With Titan, WebTrends is reassured of an extended
Dustin Harris, principal systems engineer for WebTrends. “That was
product lifespan, due to the system’s ability to quickly increase
the differentiation in BlueArc’s Titan, with its modular architecture
capacity, performance and user connectivity through a simple,
that could scale with us, and avoid a future forklift upgrade.”
modular blade storage upgrade.
WebTrends purchased Titans featuring both Serial ATA and
WebTrends’ service line is focused on the numbers – ranging
Fibre Channel disks, in a redundant, multi-tiered storage
from visitor statistics, campaign responses, and conversion behavior
configuration. This mix enabled both the highest performance
to IP address lookups. When it comes to handling the big
and highest density environment in a single system.
numbers, Titan has proven itself well up to the job – handling
The Value
terabytes of data with unmatched performance and ease of
The WebTrends On Demand hosted solution combines the speed
management – allowing WebTrends to simplify its infrastructure.
and customer convenience of a hosted service with the powerful
The Conclusion
features and options of WebTrends standalone software. The hosted
Successful Internet-focused companies like WebTrends rely on
service requires WebTrends to deliver 24x7 access and support for
cutting-edge services and technology, and must consistently plan
its enterprise customers worldwide.
to meet future demands. The secure transmission and storage
By deploying BlueArc’s Titan, WebTrends was better able to support
of the company’s digital data is a key business asset. BlueArc’s
its enterprise customers worldwide, via a single, scalable storage
Titan storage system not only provides rock-solid storage,
infrastructure. This eliminated the complexity of managing multiple,
retrieval and archival of this data, but at rates unattainable by
disparate systems. In the first few months of installation, WebTrends
common architectures. The scalability of Titan in throughput,
consolidated more than a dozen direct-attached servers to its
capacity and user load has formed a solid technology foundation
redundant Titan infrastructure.. The company also has plans to
that WebTrends can rely on, both now and in the future.
consolidate even more servers.
BlueArc Corporation
BlueArc UK Ltd.
Corporate Headquarters
European Headquarters
225 Baypointe Parkway
Queensgate House
San Jose, CA 95134
Cookham Road
t 408 576 6600
Bracknell RG12 1RB, United Kingdom
f 408 576 6601
t +44 (0) 1344 408 200
www.bluearc.com
f +44 (0) 1344 408 202
©2005 BlueArc Corporation. All rights reser ved. The BlueArc logo is a registered trademark of BlueArc Corporation.
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