South America's largest web-hosting service taps Avere

With two data centers based in Brazil and a third in Miami. Locaweb provides hosting to more than 500,000 web sites and has grown at a successful and rapid pace. With this growth, Locaweb became a victim of its own success. Growth made it extremely difficult to strategically add storage in the right locations, and with the right architecture to adequately scale as business continued to come into their data centers. Because of this NAS sprawl, the company faced significant inefficiencies, energy intensive expenses and unnecessary complexity.

"Managing all of these independent storage appliances was a difficult endeavor and time consuming," said Sal Jamil, CTO, Locaweb. "We required a solution that would allow us to sustain Locaweb's growth without buying more storage server hardware, while driving greater management of all of our devices."

After evaluating a number of available options, Locaweb picked Avere to significantly improve utilization and overall cost of managing these incongruent storage appliances. Locaweb first leveraged Avere to consolidate and simplify the management of thousands of storage appliances and drives into a single global namespace.

In addition, Avere was able to significantly help Locaweb's performance by dynamically tiering active data to high-performance FXT Series Edge filers and offloading the ZFS-based Core filers. This offload in combination with Avere's global namespace enabled Locaweb to improve its storage utilization by 100 percent, doubling the storage density in the data center.

"With Avere, we have 100 percent better utilization of our storage and linear scalability of performance which combine to make our data center highly dense and efficient," continues Marcelo Leal, storage architect, Locaweb. "We can support our 40 percent year over year growth without adding more hardware. Avere Edge filers have been a great solution for us. Spending less money on storage frees up our budget for strategic purchases. Avere positively impacts our bottom line."

"With large and rapidly expanding IT infrastructures, it's imperative for cloud and service providers to utilize the newest and most efficient technologies such as NAS optimization in order to achieve cost savings and increased efficiency," said Rebecca Thompson, vice president of marketing, Avere Systems. "Our technology continues to push the limits of price per performance giving customers a true solution that allows them to go on the offensive and tackle storage and data growth challenges."