AUTOMOTIVE

Shawn Schwegman, Overstock.com's Vice President, Technology, said, "As a top-10 shopping website, we must be prepared to handle a surge in traffic during the holiday shopping season. With EMC's infrastructure in place, our average web site page load time improved 77 percent. This is huge for us since better response time means a better shopping experience for our customers." "Information is the heart and soul of our business," said Schwegman. "Our IT infrastructure uses grid computing and powerhouse technologies of EMC and Oracle to ensure extraordinarily quick access to information. Equally important, this advanced infrastructure allows us to get the most value from our IT investments and smoothly and reliably grow our storage with our expanding customer base." Prior to replacing its existing systems with EMC, Overstock.com experienced database storage problems that the infrastructure could not support, including I/O overhead and IP issues. Consequently, Overstock.com needed to consider alternatives. Overstock.com's 70-terabyte EMC Symmetrix DMX infrastructure provides consolidated storage to an Oracle database environment -- including the 10G -- Oracle's latest, high-powered database technology. Overstock.com's Oracle databases run on clusters of Dell servers with Red Hat Linux. To support its Symmetrix infrastructure, Overstock.com also utilizes EMC software, such as ControlCenter(TM), to greatly reduce the administrative burden because administrators can more rapidly and efficiently allocate and re-allocate storage across the entire environment. Additionally, because performance and reliability are business critical, EMC software is essential for securing the safety of Overstock.com's data. Overstock.com uses EMC PowerPath for workload balancing and availability, EMC TimeFinder/Mirror to create online copies of production databases and EMC SRDF/S for synchronous replication of data stored on Symmetrix systems located in separate data centers miles apart. For example, if a duplicate database is needed for any reason, Overstock.com uses TimeFinder/Mirror to copy an entire disk volume in a few minutes without taking the database off-line, compared to the few hours needed previously. The reporting database is refreshed daily, usually starting at midnight, for use by employees the next day. The process used to take 13 hours, leaving employees just a few hours during the day to run operational reports and analytics. Because of the enhanced performance of Symmetrix DMX and TimeFinder/Mirror's functionality, the process now takes two hours, an 85 percent improvement, and employees have the entire business day for reporting and analysis. "When evaluating EMC and other storage solutions, EMC demonstrated outstanding performance, customer service and support in every test we ran," said Schwegman. "The level of support from EMC was superior to all the others."