Case Study: Online Publisher Signs Book Deal With Pillar

Blurb's IT infrastructure supports development for the BookSmart software, the client-facing Blurb website and online bookstore, support for online transaction processing and print management, and the storage infrastructure for the actual book files. As an online service, Blurb has an always-up IT infrastructure—ready to do business with customers worldwide at any time. This means that the bulk of this infrastructure must be available at all times, with maintenance and upgrades that have the least impact possible on availability.

Blurb has experienced phenomenal growth, with over 80,000 titles printed. Blurb's main storage need is the capacity to store the rendered book files, which, once a book is purchased, are stored indefinitely. To stay ahead of the growth, Blurb added a direct-attached storage RAID array, but quickly realized that they needed to do more to keep pace with growth. They needed a SAN.

Performance was of course an important factor in the company's decision, but it was the scalability, reliability, capacity utilization, and easy manageability that made the Pillar Axiom the storage choice for Blurb. Before selecting the Pillar Axiom 500, Mike Vincenty, IT Manager at Blurb, and his team looked at several solutions, including systems from Hitachi, NetApp, EMC, and even Apple. "At the end of the day, what sold us was that the Axiom was easy to manage," said Mike Vincenty. "The AxiomONE software allows us to manage all of our drives from a single interface, and add capacity without compromising functionality or efficiency. By necessity, we run a lean and efficient IT department, with a focus on simple, robust, and scalable systems. The Pillar Axiom has exceeded our expectations on that front." The Pillar Axiom is managed via the Pillar ONE Management system, which provides at-a-glance access to storage resources, assisted LUN deployment, easy provisioning, and—for those who want to delve deeper—command-line access to individual storage details.