Slacker Radio, an Internet radio service, is using GlusterFS, the community-developed product incorporated into Red Hat Storage, to give users a high-quality listening experience without exceeding budget and making changes to existing architecture.
With more than 30 million listeners, Slacker is focused on providing a unique and custom listening experience. Since the company increases its storage about 60 terabytes every six to nine months, it needed cost-efficient storage that could scale easily without affecting performance. With GlusterFS, Slacker was able to reach over one petabyte of raw storage which it could not have done cost effectively before. Slacker selected GlusterFS due to its ability to meet the company's ever-increasing demands for scalability, ease of use and cost savings, and also could be seamlessly deployed in the company's existing architecture.
Here is what Liam Slusser, a systems engineer at Slacker, has to say about GlusterFS: “Our data grows constantly, averaging an increase of about 60 terabytes every six to nine months, causing a huge strain on our budget and making it nearly impossible for our necessary expansion to match our budget requirements. We are confident that choosing GlusterFS has given us a better storage environment while also cutting our costs by 80 percent and easing management pains. It's the ideal solution that supports our growth without breaking our budget. Storage used to be the most expensive thing we were doing and now it is the cheapest; that is priceless to us.”
GlusterFS technology has a user-friendly interface that enables all employees within the IT department to perform tasks when necessary, allowing users to quickly build a secure, thin provisioned, multi-tenant, scale-out storage system. Additionally, GlusterFS technology enables Slacker to save on costs that have been redistributed to other areas of the organization. Moving to GlusterFS from its previous storage providers saved Slacker more than half a million dollars, allowing the company to invest in other key infrastructure areas, including network and server upgrades.
With the GlusterFS technology, Slacker was able to replace and upgrade its storage system while also being able to buy new hardware since its last storage solution was proprietary. It has allowed Slacker to decrease spending while the company has significantly increased its storage capacity from 78 terabytes to 440 terabytes.