Chances are, if you’ve ever rented an apartment, you’ve interfaced with RealPage. Rental real estate is a trillion-dollar-a-year market and this Dell EMC customer has the largest database of lease transactions in the country.
RealPage specializes in helping property management firms handle everything from rentals and leasing to marketing and accounting on a variety of properties including apartments, single-family homes, vacation rentals and commercial real estate. In addition, some smaller real estate firms rely on RealPage for complete IT-as-a-service solutions. The company provides on-demand, cloud-based software and data analytics 24/7 to more than 12,000 clients in North America, Europe and Asia.
When its previous servers couldn’t keep pace with client demands, RealPage turned to Dell EMC PowerEdge servers.
“With our previous servers, we were struggling to add properties for one of our largest and best clients. The PowerEdge R940xa solved our scaling problem, enabling us to easily handle the growing workloads and continue to expand our relationship with them.”
— Barry Carter, Chief Information Officer, RealPage
Billions of reasons to refresh
RealPage is one of the world’s largest software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers as well as one of the ten biggest users of Microsoft SQL—with more than 100,000 Microsoft SQL databases and 11 PB of storage. On peak days, the company processes over five billion transactions and produces two million reports for clients.
Recently, RealPage decided to do a rapid server refresh using Dell EMC PowerEdge.
“We chose Dell EMC PowerEdge servers not only for their speed and throughput, but also because various models are tailored for different workloads.”
— Barry Carter, Chief Information Officer, RealPage
For its SQL databases in a VMware virtualized environment, the company chose PowerEdge R740 rack servers. For its other spiraling workloads, RealPage opted for the extreme scale and performance of PowerEdge R940xa servers.
Workhorse substantially reduces SQL licensing costs
Microsoft SQL licensing is determined by the number of server cores used. With RealPage’s enormous deployment, these costs represent a major expense. The company’s new PowerEdge servers help it deliver on-demand software and analytics solutions much more cost effectively.
“The PowerEdge R740 is the workhorse for our SQL Server environment—reducing our server needs by one third with significant license fee savings.”
— Barry Carter, Chief Information Officer, RealPage
Diving into a data lake
Another project RealPage tackled recently was to begin building the nation’s largest shared data repository of lease transactions. This is used for operational and market forecasting, rental pricing and more.
RealPage was initially told by numerous vendors that it wouldn’t be possible to dive into a data lake without using “bare metal” solutions. Then, the company talked to Dell EMC.
“Dell EMC solved our data lake challenge with PowerEdge servers running in a VMware environment with Dell EMC Isilon network-attached storage,” remarks Carter. “This gave us the power and throughput we needed, while reducing physical storage by two-thirds. We also didn’t have to retrain our IT team to deal with bare metal.”
Maintaining a mutually beneficial relationship
RealPage has partnered with Dell EMC throughout RealPage’s two decades in business. Over the years, Dell’s single-provider support has been essential.
“With Dell, we get world-class support, so we can avoid the finger-pointing you get with competing vendors. This is a key to our relationship.”
— Barry Carter, Chief Information Officer, RealPage
Read the case study to learn more about how RealPage runs its business on Dell EMC. For additional information about PowerEdge servers, visit dellemc.com/servers. Join the conversation on Twitter @DellEMCservers.
