Applications for the MaxiScale FLEX Software Platform

Serving billions of thumbnails and photos

Benefits

  • Fast photo serving: retrieve any photo under 1 MB in one guaranteed single disk I/O under 5 milliseconds
  • Support billions of photo views on a tight budget: rapidly serve photos direct from low cost, high capacity disks without expensive, proprietary hardware
  • Scale photo serving load and capacity with user demand: simply add more nodes to simultaneously increase performance and capacity within a single namespace

Millions of people now access and post billions of photos every day to photo sharing and social networking Web sites. With uploads ranging for between 1% and 5% of total file serving load*, administrators must contend with millions to billions of random thumbnail and photo retrieval operations. The MaxiScale FLEX Software Platform delivers the lowest cost per photo retrieval with single disk I/O operation reads for files up to 1 MB. MaxiScale can easily deliver 100 million daily file retrievals with high availability, while running on just several inexpensive, standard server nodes..

Learn more by reading about single disk I/O operation reads with the MaxiScale FLEX Software Platform.

*MaxiScale user research, August 2009

Single namespace storage consolidation

Benefits

  • Lower cost to manage: a single namespace eliminates management costs across multiple storage islands including file re-balancing, multi-source backups, and updating application mount points
  • Rapidly add, configure capacity: one centralized management interface to add capacity with a single click and ensure proper configuration and load balancing
  • Organically grow storage without boundaries: add capacity without limitations and without application changes or downtime

Web sites of all kinds have long outgrown the file serving capacity of a single NAS device, causing administrators to deploy multiple storage islands, each with its own namespace. The MaxiScale FLEX Software Platform enables administrators to regain control and consolidate file serving into a single namespace reaching hundreds of petabytes, maintaining performance, and serving thousands to millions of files each second.

Learn more about single namespace at petabyte scale with the MaxiScale FLEX Software Platform.

Origin serving direct from disk

Benefits

  • Lower application delivery cost: starting with a massively scalable file serving origin, administrators can reduce or eliminate intermediate layers in the delivery stack
  • Rapidly serve content to users: sub-5 millisecond file serving latencies and terabyte/second aggregate bandwidth power user communities at global scale
  • Grow origin serving in step with the business: deploy origin capacity without performance cliffs, obviating the need to over-provision hardware in anticipation of painful upgradess

File serving inefficiencies have become a falsely accepted cost of doing business in Web-scale applications. The typical response adds costly layers to the Web delivery stack to keep up with user demand. The MaxiScale FLEX Software Platform changes the game with disk-based, Internet-scale origin serving. Administrators can serve petabytes of content at gigabytes to terabytes per second, and all from a single namespace with MaxiScale .

Learn more in the Building File Systems For Web-Scale Applications whitepaper.

Web logging and analytics

Benefits

  • No throttling required: the MaxiScale FLEX Software Platform expands horizontally to accommodate higher throughput, eliminating the need to throttle batch uploads
  • Scale seamlessly: add new capacity in minutes with a single click, easily expanding the amount of retained log data
  • Reduce logging costs: save on capital costs with standard hardware and cut operational costs without compromised workflows such as customized scripts that compensate for non-scalable file servers

Large Web sites rely on logging to track customer behavior, improve the user experience, and display more relevant content, yet 60% of storage budgets go towards maintenance versus deploying new capacity to advance the business.* The MaxiScale FLEX Software Platform accommodates the logging demands for thousands of servers with a single repository and dramatically cuts management overhead for log storage compared with traditional file servers.

Learn more in the Log Data Deluge: Managing Each and Every Click article.

*IDC, March 2009

Migrating databases to key value store

Benefits

  • Fast key lookups: return a value up to 1 MB from a key up to 1,000 characters with a guaranteed single disk I/O operation averaging under 5 milliseconds
  • Support Internet-scale applications: operate with billions of keys and petabytes of data without the application complexity of sharding across multiple SQL database instances
  • Low-cost SQL replacement: no database administration, one component to manage, simple application lookups

Exploding Web application workloads are causing administrators to look beyond SQL databases to key value stores for fast lookups on simple keys. The MaxiScale key value store returns values within milliseconds from lookups across billions of keys, dramatically reducing SQL complexities and speeding application response time to users.