Premier “Do-it-Yourself” Publisher Deploys Acopia ARX Systems and FreedomFabric Operating System Software to Support Data Tiering, Global Namespace, and Replication for Disaster Recovery (DR) Efforts
Lowell, MA – July 23, 2007 – Acopia Networks®, Inc., the world’s leading provider of high-performance, intelligent file virtualization solutions, today announced that Lulu.com, the premier marketplace for new digital content on the Internet, has deployed its Acopia ARX™ systems, together with Acopia FreedomFabric™ operating system software, to manage the exponential growth of its file data.
Lulu is the “do-it-yourself” marketplace for authors and other creators of content allowing initiation and control of all aspects of the publishing process, from design and layout, to pricing, promotion, and distribution – via Amazon.com, Borders, Barnes & Noble.com, and on Lulu.com itself. Lulu has over 300,000 recently published titles, with a current run-rate of approximately 4,000 titles per week. As a result of this phenomenal growth, Lulu’s file storage environment is growing almost 300% annually.
“We store all content indefinitely. As a consequence, our storage resources, primarily EMC Celerra, would fill up frequently, forcing us to reallocate and move content around manually, and keep our application database synchronized with those changes. We also had dozens of mount points across dozens of application servers, which had become unmanageable. With one-to-two hours of engineering time each day dedicated to these efforts, it was becoming a taxing drain on resources. Moreover, we were concerned about possible performance implications,” said Bill Montgomery, manager of information systems, Lulu. “We chose the Acopia solution because it offered us the ability to vastly simplify our data layout, reduce the number of mount points, and make the movement of data automated and transparent to the business.”
“By leveraging Acopia’s automatic tiering capabilities, Lulu effortlessly moves highly active ‘hot’ content to more expensive high performance disk resources, while less active, but still vital content, is moved to less expensive disks. This alone has provided an immense resource saving – both in dollars and man-hours,” Montgomery continued. “What is more, Acopia gives us total vendor independence – we are now free to fully leverage existing assets, as well as invest appropriately, as future needs dictate.”
“Lulu’s deployment of Acopia’s intelligent file virtualization allows them to efficiently and cost effectively address their file storage growth challenges,” said Kirby Wadsworth, senior vice president of marketing and business development, Acopia. “We are thrilled to add Lulu.com to the growing community of Acopia fans.”
Lulu’s future plans for the Acopia solution include its use in easing the deployment of new network-attached storage (NAS) resources, as well as in conjunction with its replication for disaster recovery (DR) efforts.
About Lulu
Lulu.com is the premier marketplace for new digital content on the Internet, with more than 300,000 creations, and more than 4,000 new titles added each week, created by people in 80 different countries. With one million registered users, Lulu is changing the world of publishing by enabling the creators of books, video, periodicals, multimedia and other content to publish their work themselves with complete editorial and copyright control. Lulu empowers these individuals and corporations to create high quality products to sell directly to their customers and the rest of the Lulu.com marketplace. With storefronts provided as well as other marketing assistance, creators are fully supported to profit from their work. With Lulu offices in the US, Canada and Europe, Lulu customers can reach the globe. For additional information, please visit: www.lulu.com.
About Acopia Networks
Acopia Networks is the leader in high-performance, intelligent file virtualization. Solutions based on Acopia’s FreedomFabric™ network operating system software help customers manage the growth, complexity, and cost of unstructured, globally distributed, file-based information. By providing automatic, policy-driven, data migration, tiering, load balancing, snapshots, and replication across multi-vendor storage environments, Acopia helps IT executives to reduce management overhead and accelerate business workflow. For further information about Acopia’s products and services, please visit its Website at www.acopia.com, call 978-513-2900 (US) / 49-89-944-90-165 (Europe) or email info@acopia.com.
© 2007 Acopia Networks, Inc. Acopia, Acopia Networks, ARX, and FreedomFabric are trademarks of Acopia Networks, Inc. All other brands, products, or service names may be trademarks or service marks of the companies with which they are associated.
Contact:
Nicole Gorman
Acopia Networks, Inc.
508-397-0131
ngorman@acopia.com