CASE STUDY

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CASE STUDY:ATYPON SYSTEMS, INC

I am very happy to

work with SoftNAS and I have

proactively suggested to folks

that are looking for solutions to

consider SoftNAS.

SoftNAS™ Meets All the Functionality Requirements of Atypon® Systems

As one of the top Software as a Service content delivery providers, Atypon

helps publishers and media organizations compete in the business world.

Atypon’s ePublishing platform, Literatum, supports publishers with key

features such as advanced search and information discovery, reporting

and advertising. With RightSuite, Atypon’s access and e-commerce

solution, publishers and media organizations can monetize their content

and optimize revenue streams.

After trying multiple storage solutions, including their own home-built NFS

server, Atypon Systems now has a reliable storage solution that meets their

functionality requirements and is backed by an innovative support team.

Atypon now uses SoftNAS to handle its data recovery (DR) solution.

Existing Storage Solutions Fail to Meet Atypon’s Requirements

Atypon Systems, Inc is a software company that operates primarily on

a Software as a Service (SaaS) model. The company serves close to a

hundred customers, mainly in the scientific publishing sector and therefore

handles a large amount of data in their storage servers. Atypon has an

on-site data center in California, but recently took interest in increasing its

presence in the cloud.

Constantinos Karantzas, Atypon’s VP of Cloud Engineering, had three

basic requirements while searching for an NFS-based solution with fully

featured managed storage in Amazon Cloud: reliability, consistent uptime

(no downtime), and performance.

Before finding SoftNAS, Karantzas tried several other solutions such as

Amazon S3 and Gluster FS, but the existing solutions came with limitations

and didn’t meet Atypon’s standards. With Amazon S3, the write speeds

were too slow and Gluster FS was unable to scale up effectively to the

hundreds of millions of files Atypon has.

Constantinos Karantzas, Atypon’s VP of Cloud Engineering

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CASE STUDY:ATYPON SYSTEMS, INC

Another solution that Atypon attempted before SoftNAS was their own

home-built NFS server based on RAID 10. “But we always lacked the

features and functionality we were used to from our own storage server,”

said Karantzas. “For example, adding storage seamlessly, having snapshot

capability, being able to take writeable snapshots and substantiate them.

All those things were features that we care about very much.”

The Solution – A Reliable Full-Featured NAS in AWS

For Atypon, a fully featured managed storage system in Amazon Cloud

was a requirement. When Constantinos found SoftNAS, it met all of

Atypon’s functionality requirements. In June 2013, Atypon implemented

SoftNAS into their system, but the transition to SoftNAS wasn’t without

a few problems. “We found scalability problems, we found performance

problems,” said Karantzas. “But at the end, we had a common goal.”

That goal was to make SoftNAS a reliable and capable product that could

work for Atypon. Whenever Karantzas came upon issues, the SoftNAS

team was attentive and responsive with solutions. One such problem

involved the number of volumes Atypon could mount on a single EC2

instance in Amazon.

“We did not realize that it depends on how you use the naming structure

of the volumes,” said Karantzas. “You can be severely limited. At that point

I think we were around 20 volumes and we were done. Since we wanted

to grow our system substantially higher than that, SoftNAS worked with

Amazon, identified the issue, came up with a solution, and worked with us,

and we migrated our volumes to the new volume structure. And the whole

thing happened with zero data loss and [as] a fairly simple process.”

In November 2013, Atypon was able to begin using SoftNAS without

difficulties, giving the company access to a reliable NAS in Amazon Cloud

that is similar to their own on-site storage servers. Atypon now uses

SoftNAS to handle the data for Atypon’s Data Recovery (DR) solution.

[SoftNAS] allows us to

operate in the Amazon Cloud

in the same way we’re

operating in our data center.

It made the migration that

much smoother.

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CASE STUDY:ATYPON SYSTEMS, INC

I found the team is

both innovative and very

customer friendly.

The SoftNAS StorageCenter’s™ flexible and easy to manage storage

administration allows Atypon to configure new storage pools quickly and

effortlessly. The web-based interface is simple yet powerful and includes

the full spectrum of advanced capabilities that storage experts expect.

With SoftNAS SnapReplicate™, Atypon can use block replication to quickly

configure a complete replication and disaster recovery solution within

minutes without having to worry about slow write speeds.

SoftNAS’ multi-tier caching means that while RAM is automatically used

as high-speed cache, Atypon can also configure a second level read

cache with hundreds of GB of SSD or local ephemeral disks. RAID 10 with

RAM caching increases read performance up to 10,000 IOPS and SSD

caching can increase read performance to 50,000 or more IOPS. SoftNAS

also offers standard Linux-based identity management, so NFS files and

directory ownership and permissions operate as expected.

In addition to SoftNAS meeting Atypon’s technical requirements, the

SoftNAS support team has also been an integral part of Atypon’s

experience with SoftNAS.

“[The SoftNAS team is] not only knowledgeable, but inventive,” said

Karantzas. “Every person I interacted with, it was always a pleasure

working with that team. At the end of the day, people make the company...

And I had a very good experience working with everyone at SoftNAS.”

About SoftNAS

SoftNAS, LLC is a leading storage software company that provides Simply

Powerful™ agile storage software that protects mission-critical data

in the cloud. SoftNAS believes that storage can be both powerful and

frictionless, providing customers with the enterprise-grade NAS storage

capabilities required to safely and reliably operate mission-critical IT

systems and applications in the cloud. SoftNAS supports the most popular

cloud computing platforms, including Amazon Web Services®, Microsoft®

and VMware®. www.softnas.com

[The SoftNAS team]

is number one. It is not

only knowledgeable, but very

inventive.

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CASE STUDY:ATYPON SYSTEMS, INC

Every person I’ve

interacted with, it was always

a pleasure working with that

team. At the end of the day,

people make the company

and I had a very good

experience working with

everybody at SoftNAS.

– Constantinos Karantzas, VP of Cloud Engineering

Atypon Systems, Inc

About Atypon

Atypon delivers innovative solutions that revolutionize the way publishers

and media organizations do business. Literatum, Atypon’s flagship

ePublishing platform, provides all of the functionality that publishers

need to compete in the digital world, including advanced search and

information discovery, access control, e-commerce, advertising and

reporting. Literatum hosts more than 17 million journal articles, 100,000

eBooks, and many other types of scientific and scholarly content for

leading publishers worldwide. Atypon’s RightSuite offers an access and

e-commerce solution that enables publishers and media organizations to

monetize their digital content, experiment with new business models and

optimize revenue streams.

Atypon Info

Web: www.atypon.com

Headquarters: Santa Clara, CA, USA

Industry: ePublishing and e-commerce

SoftNAS customer: Since 2013

Need: Needed a full featured managed storage solution in Amazon Cloud

The Solution: Reliable SoftNAS in AWS