The holidays are upon us and shoppers are in vigorous pursuit to acquire the ‘hottest’ holiday gift items. eMarketer.com stated, “in 2015 eCommerce holiday shopping should see an estimated year over year growth of 5.7 percent”. I’d like to pause here for a second and ask you to think about the e-commerce demands and what it takes to process our transactions. As a consumer, I know I am constantly looking for my transactions to process faster, what about you? Many companies simply don’t have the resources, infrastructure, and experience to pull it off, especially on a global scale. In this blog I’d like to introduce you to an EMC customer who provides support for companies in the eCommerce world.
Digital River is a Minnesota-based company, who delivers cloud-based eCommerce solutions globally for clients large and small; these solutions provide cutting-edge resources to address today’s commerce demands and challenges. They handle everything from personal information to PCI data and credit card numbers. So the end game for Digital River is to support their client’s requirements, while delivering fast, flexible solutions at a competitive price point.
Digital River relies on a combination of private and third party clouds to deliver their hybrid cloud solution. This approach affords them the flexibility of a plug and play infrastructure, almost as easy as putting together LEGO building blocks. The Digital River cloud environment runs custom-developed global commerce and payments applications backed by Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, and IBM DB2.
The storage component for Digital River’s private cloud is EMC® VMAX™ with Fully Automated Storage Tiering (FAST) Virtual Pools ™ (VP) with FAST VP. Whether there is a need for high-speed, mid-tier, or low-end storage, applications are aligned to the optimal tier on VMAX to meet client performance requirements. Digital River is also using EMC VPLEX® for storage virtualization, so they can easily move applications, virtual machines, and data across global data centers without disrupting delivery of services to clients or their consumers. Using VMware vSphere, they’ve spun up about 10,000 virtual machines on 6,000 physical devices. As a result, virtualization has helped Digital River speed up delivering new solutions, as well as spinning up environments and workloads practically anywhere on a moment’s notice.
Earlier I briefly touched on the different types of personal and consumer data Digital River handles, with that said, data protection is extremely important. EMC Avamar® and EMC Data Domain™ provide seamless protection across the Digital River data centers. In fact, the entire core infrastructure is backed up with Avamar and stored on Data Domain systems. This combination gives Digital River the confidence that data is being backed up and deduplicated, provides the speed to recover data (if needed), and enables the company to set a data retention and destruction timeframe. Digital River has also been able to reduce their total cost of ownership with repeatable, reusable metrics that assure data is consistently available and properly protected.
As online purchasing skyrockets during the holidays, I know one thing for certain…Digital River is ready to support the season. View this video for further details around why Digital River standardized on EMC.