Critical Path

"Solid Data's solid-state disk provided a great solution for our ongoing performance requirements and did so at a price that is easy to justify and manage moving forward."

Joe Duncan,
Chief Information Officer
Critical Path

Overview
Critical Path, Inc., a leading provider of business-to-business Internet messaging solutions for corporations, Internet service providers, Web hosting companies, and Web portals, needed to scale the load capacity of their email servers to accommodate rapid growth, while maintaining a high standard of performance.

As Critical Path plotted its rapid expansion and growth, it became evident that they would need to invest in system capacity upgrades in order to keep up with customer demand. The company wanted to create a system architecture that would allow it to increase the load without experiencing I/O bottlenecks that could slow user response time and constrain the number of email messages processed. Its one option was to scale their system capacity horizontally by adding servers. However, this was an expensive proposition from the onset. All of this additional equipment would add complexity for the system administrators and would increase hardware and administration costs, floor space requirements, and power and air conditioning usage. "We realized that this clearly would not be the best approach as we projected continued rapid growth going forward" said Joe Duncan, Critical Path's CIO. "We were looking at millions in hardware costs just to solve our initial requirements. With the company's plans for expansion, we needed a more affordable and extensible solution." So Duncan turned to solid-state storage.

Duncan found that incorporating Solid Data 900 Class Solid-State Disk systems into Critical Path's existing server configurations would prevent the bottlenecks and provide the required performance levels. Performance testing revealed that the Solid Data solid-state disk systems reduced user response time and increased load capacity by eight times. With the added Solid Data solid-state disk implementation, that number of messages each server cluster could process increased by 8 times. In addition, operational resiliency (MTBF) increased by 16 times.

With the Solid Data solid-state disk systems coming in at a fraction of the cost of additional servers, Critical Path was able to save the expense slated for the additional servers. The company's return on investment in solid-state storage was over 600%. The small footprint solid-state disk systems also required less floor space, power and air conditioning, and administrative overhead than the initial plan of adding servers. "Solid Data's solid-state disk provided a great solution for our ongoing performance requirements and did so at a price that is easy to justify and manage moving forward," said Joe Duncan.

Summary
Critical Path needed a solution that would enable it, as a provider of advanced messaging solutions, to meet customer demand and maintain fast user response time through a period of rapid growth. They were looking for an alternative to costly horizontal scaling of servers. Adding Solid Data solid-state disk to their systems storage architecture enabled the company to improve performance by eight times and improve reliability by 16 times, while saving in costly hardware expenses.

Critical Path Case Study PDF: 19 KB (critical_path.pdf)