CASE STUDY - Assuring 24/7 Analytic Availability to More Than 2,000 Major Online Sites
Commentary by Shawn Farshchi, Chief Operating Officer, Coremetrics
Optimizing Performance for Innovative Analytic Applications
As one of the industry’s leaders in online marketing and business optimization solutions, Coremetrics guarantees its clients access to a high-performance SaaS platform that delivers valuable data-driven content for many of the world’s major brands.
Coremetrics serves 2,000 companies that process more than $20 billion in transactions per year, and received top rankings for strategy and customer satisfaction from independent analyst firm Forrester Research, Inc. Coremetrics is well known for its service-level agreements (SLAs) that allow clients to fully leverage online customer interactions in real time, 24/7.
However, when Coremetrics planned to introduce more advanced analytic applications, soaring data volumes suggested that the company reevaluate its database infrastructure. Next-generation analytic tools would face formidable optimization limits to deliver the high performance that new applications would demand.
Maintain a Competitive Advantage in Both Cost and Performance
Because Coremetrics enjoys such an impressive reputation for meeting and exceeding its SLAs, it was essential to deploy a highly scalable, massively parallel database solution for current applications, and support future applications to maintain the company’s competitive advantage.
Overall, the strategic business objectives required a fault-tolerant environment to maintain high availability, backup and restore functionality to assure reliability, and live server administration capabilities to eliminate downtime. But controlling software and hardware costs was also a key objective.
According to chief operating officer Shawn Farshchi, “Our goal was to deploy a mature database platform that provided superior scalability on commodity hardware—to give us both a tremendous cost and performance advantage. Aster Data was the only company we could find that gave us this capability.”
Massively Scalable, Massively Parallel Data Warehouse
Aster Data nCluster is the industry’s first massively parallel data warehouse architecture that allows applications to be fully embedded within the database engine, which enables ultrafast, deep analysis of massive data sets.
“Aster Data delivers superior scalability on commodity hardware—giving us a tremendous cost and performance advantage.” —Shawn Farshchi, Chief Operating Officer, Coremetrics
It’s a significant improvement over traditional data warehouses, which weren’t designed to keep up with the data loads of today’s big data applications. Aster Data’s massively parallel data application server effectively uses Aster’s patent-pending SQL-MapReduce with data and application parallelization to address the big data challenge.
Aster Data deployed its nCluster data-application server across Coremetrics’s commodity hardware cluster with multiple terabytes of capacity.
Support for New Innovative Applications, Sharply Lower Capital Expenditure Costs
Once the Aster Data nCluster database was deployed for several Coremetrics applications, it was obvious the platform gave the company more control in managing its customers’ data and could easily cope with soaring growth and large traffic spikes.
In fact, Coremetrics now supports a 20-fold increase in server calls—while maintaining 24/7 availability and resiliency on a highly reliable fault-tolerant platform. And because the solution runs on inexpensive commodity hardware, Coremetrics has had substantially reduced capital expenditures for its data infrastructure.
Most important, the company is no longer bound by old infrastructure limitations. Now customers have access to new and innovative applications that are deployed on top of the new and more robust data infrastructure.
These applications include Coremetrics AdTargetTM and Coremetrics Intelligent OfferTM, which automatically generate personalized content and behavior-based product recommendations and content in real time to fully leverage customer data.
According to Farshchi, “Aster Data helped us meet or exceed all of our goals. We’ve improved performance and reduced our costs. We now have enormous freedom to introduce even more powerful data-driven marketing and analytics solutions that help some of the world’s largest companies drive business results.”
For a free white paper on this topic from Aster Data, click here and choose the title "Aster Data nCluster: A New Architecture for Large-Scale Data Analytics.” For more free white papers, click here.