How MercadoLibre Improves the Performance of Private Cloud

Cloud storage can store data into logical pools; it is spread into multiple servers and that physical environment is owned by a hosting company that also manages the data. Also, the provider company has to keep the data available and easy to access at all times. This is important because large scale companies, and one of them is MercadoLibre, require storage for a great amount of digital data, every day gigabytes and gigabytes information is uploading.

Company Overview MercadoLibre is known as the largest Latino American E-Commerce ecosystem. They provide both buyers and sellers with a variety of services. Those services, which are available in the 13 countries where they successfully operate, include a marketplace, payments, advertising and solutions for e-building. MercadoLibre succeeds in providing a strong and healthy environment for their buyers and sellers’ trading, which helps them to grow their e-commerce community.

Challenges MercadoLibre Had MercadoLibre used to rely on an OpenStack private cloud for deploying their IT infrastructure. However, its storage infrastructure was unable to give the desired results and the amount of performance that were required due to its constantly expanding application base. According to the storage specialist at MercadoLibre, Mariano Guelar, their administrators were constantly asking to provide them with a different storage type.

More precisely, they asked for something that was more efficient. Namely, they experienced a lot of difficulties in balancing the performance workloads inside their system. Because of that, arriving at a point where everyone was happy with the system response time and the performance of the application seemed impossible. MercadoLibre ran a wide range of applications through its OpenStack cloud, and all of them had issues with speed so that their performance was unpredictable. That is when Solidfire came in play.

Taking into account these difficulties, finding a storage solution that was scale-out was extremely important to MercadoLibre. Scale-up storage designs are hard to scale so that in order to grow them, you have to buy separate, bigger systems. Once you do this, the

migration can cause significant amounts of downtime, and that’s not good if you run a 24x7 business where you need 100% uptime. MercadoLibre wanted a solution where they could start with a slower pace and add the capacity and performance they need.

The Solution Is Called SolidFire SolidFire is known for building scale-out storage systems for cloud service providers which are high-performing. However, the problem with adding more and more nodes is downtime. A business that runs 24/7 like MercadoLibre uses SolidFire to start off with a small infrastructure and later on add more and more nodes as the demands dictate. They revealed that they found out about SolidFire in Hong Kong during a Design Summit in 2013 and that an existing SolidFire customer from the US recommended SolidFire to them.

SolidFire gave them a live demonstration of the product, so they had a possibility to get acquainted with the product interface. It was cleverly done using EZ Talks, which is an Easy cloud HD Video Conferencing platform. They did some testing and once they got a feel for the way the platform performs, they were fascinated by the outcome results.

What Did SolidFire Do for Them?

SolidFire provided not only an excellent performance that was more predictable but also a faster response time. Also, SolidFire’s unique service quality and all-flash architecture served to reduce latency that MercadoLibre had by a significant amount. What is even more, SolidFire can plug into MercadoLibre’s existing cloud framework, which results in a better and faster system administration.

Since SolidFire provides compression and deduplication, it reduces the company’s data storage space and requirements dramatically as well as power and cooling needs. All of that makes this solution perfect for near future.

The Results The improvements that MercadoLibre felt were immediate. Their latency was reduced to around 2 milliseconds from the previous 50 milliseconds. Their storage systems always had inconsistent latency, which was constantly a problem both for customers and their database workloads. They manage to make communications faster, smaller and cheaper to maintain.

Inline deduplication and compression reduced the data footprint by 6.5 times for MercadoLibre. And for other companies that want to deploy a private cloud or just boost their existing cloud infrastructure, there is no better solution than SolidFire. The product is well designed and is future-oriented, just like all the large scale-data centers.

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