Download a PDF version of BlueArc's WebTrends Customer Case Study
WebTrends, the global leader in web analytics, counts on BlueArc Titan storage systems to store and manage real-time, on-demand Web statistics from thousands of enterprise Web sites simultaneously. With uncompromising performance and scalability, BlueArc has enabled the company to consolidate dozens of disparate servers and simplify its infrastructure.
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 500 companies, rely on WebTrends to help them improve their return on investment, from campaign performance and search engine marketing, to web site conversion and customer retention.
The company’s web analytics platform—WebTrends 7—is available through both hosted, 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 redundant data collection, co-location of data centers and an unmatched staging environment for quality control of customer data.
"You've got a fixed headcount managing more and more servers. We needed a way to consolidate the file services."
"We had to get something that could scale in a different way. That was the differentiation in BlueArc's Titan, with its modular architecture that could scale with us, and avoid a forklift upgrade."
"We plan on taking 18 servers down to one Titan. Consolidation can help us defer future purchases."
"There are a number of benefits - simplicity and the reduction of complexity. Greater reliability. Not so many moving parts. Being able to grow the service without a proportional growth in headcount."
-- Dustin Harris,First launched in 1999, WebTrends’ hosted offering quickly attracted thousands of enterprise 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’ 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 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.
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.
"We had to get something that could scale in a different way," said Dustin Harris, principal systems engineer for WebTrends. "That was the differentiation in BlueArc’s Titan, with its modular architecture that could scale with us, and avoid a future forklift upgrade."
WebTrends purchased Titans featuring both Serial ATA and Fibre Channel disks, in a redundant, Tiered Storage configuration. This mix enabled both the highest performance and highest density environment in a single system.
The WebTrends On Demand hosted solution combines the speed and customer convenience of a hosted service with the powerful features and options of WebTrends standalone software. The hosted service requires WebTrends to deliver 24x7 access and support for its enterprise customers worldwide.
By deploying BlueArc’s Titan, WebTrends was better able to support its enterprise customers worldwide, via a single, scalable storage infrastructure. This eliminated the complexity of managing multiple, disparate systems. In the first few months of installation, WebTrends consolidated more than a dozen direct-attached servers to its redundant Titan infrastructure. The company also has plans to consolidate even more servers.
While helping WebTrends to reduce costs and management overhead tied to the WebTrends On Demand storage infrastructure, BlueArc Titan servers 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 costs. 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 along with it. With Titan, WebTrends is reassured of an extended product lifespan, due to the system's ability to quickly increase capacity, performance and user connectivity through a simple, modular blade storage upgrade.
WebTrends' service line is focused on the numbers -- ranging from visitor statistics, campaign responses and conversion behavior to IP address lookups. When it comes to handling the big numbers, Titan has proven itself well up to the job--handling terabytes of data with unmatched performance and ease of management—allowing WebTrends to simplify its infrastructure.
Successful Internet-focused companies like WebTrends rely on cutting-edge services and technology, and must consistently plan to meet future demands. The secure transmission and storage of the company’s digital data is a key business asset. BlueArc’s Titan storage system not only provides rock-solid storage, retrieval and archival of this data, but at rates unattainable by common architectures. The scalability of Titan in throughput, capacity and user load has formed a solid technology foundation that WebTrends can rely on, both now and in the future.