SpringCM

3
Case study | SpringCM
Rethinking retrieval
The team wanted to be able to retrieve those
large data sets faster than a standard server
farm would allow. “We could have attempted
to build a new system on big powerful servers
with a bunch of memory,” recalls Papatsaras.
“But we saw that a more distributed system
would be a better way to go.”
King agrees. “We needed something fast,
cost-eective, and scalable, and my gut was
telling me HP Moonshot might be the answer.”
Because SpringCM was already running
their HP servers on DataStax Enterprise, the
team began having conversations with the
two technology leaders about the idea of
using Moonshot servers to build out its new
architecture.
“DataStax Enterprise is our database platform
of choice because of its ability to scale linearly
and lighting fast performance,” explained
Papatsaras. “It’s integrated analytics and
search capabilities allow for real time retrieval
of documents”
A better model
“We thought that it would work, because of
DataStax Enterprise’s masterless architecture
which addresses workloads in equally
equipped nodes,” King explains. “If you can
get DataStax Enterprise writing across more
nodes, you have more paths to address disk,
which means better performance. And since
the data is replicated across nodes, DataStax
Enterprise will never go down which can be
the dierence between winning and losing a
deal.”
But SpringCM needed assurances from
DataStax and the HP Moonshot team that
they would be supported. “DataStax was quite
willing to give us their time getting over the
humps we faced,” King reports. “And the
HP Moonshot team in Houston was great
every step of the way.”
After seeing a benchmark of DataStax
Enterprise running SpringCM’s workload
prole on HP Moonshot servers, the decision
was made.
Density delivered
SpringCM deployed two Moonshot 1500
Chassis, each populated with 15 HP ProLiant
m710 Servers. Each server is congured
with 32 GB RAM, and 480 GB of ash storage
to run the DataStax Enterprise distributed
database which power SpringCM’s SaaS-based
document management solution.
“HP Moonshot technology provides us with
the extreme density we need in a dynamically
reduced form factor,” King sums up. With 15
ProLiant m710 servers in a 4.3U space, the
solution benets SpringCM from not just an IT
footprint perspective, but an overall business
agility perspective as well.
Matters of scale
“The logistics of deploying racks of traditional
servers—routing, cabling, networking—is
a complex prospect,” says King. “Because
Moonshot has 40Gb networking built right into
the chassis, all you have to do to scale is plug
in another server.”
From an engineering perspective, Papatsaras
agrees. “When you’re thinking about
operations and engineering, our philosophy
is to write good software,” the CTO explains.
“Then, when you want to scale, you just need
to support more workow by adding more
compute power. The last thing I want is for
my team to rewrite software. We need an
architecture and database platform that play
well together, and with DataStax Enterprise
and Moonshot, we have that. It’s an integration
that’s absolutely built for scalability without
sacricing on performance and availability.”