Archimedia taps into unprecedented performance to boosts its compete power

Archimedia is an independent software vendor servicing large accounts. Its clientele needs automated solutions to manage, catalog and preserve digital assets such as videos and images—in other words, big data storage and processing. With servers being the backbone of its solution, Archimedia simply cannot afford suboptimal performance, which will only lead to customer dissatisfaction and make acquiring and servicing new customers difficult.

To optimize its infrastructure, Archimedia considered several options before deciding on SherWeb’s high-performance cloud servers. Now that it’s able to flexibly provision on-demand servers for its customers, the vendor says it’s doing a lot more for less. It has also been freed from day-to-day infrastructure maintenance, and can now devote more time to core activities. Archimedia says that thanks to the value it gets in terms of cost and performance, SherWeb Performance Cloud has in many ways transformed its business.

Challenge

Increase business agility through IT infrastructure by improving performance and reducing costs, and ultimately improving the customer experience.

Solution

SherWeb Performance Cloud

Results

7x faster processing speeds on asset management transactions, translating into better user experience and lower aggregate infrastructure costs

$10,000 annual savings in infrastructure maintenance & storage provisioning, freeing precious time to focus on core activities

Solution’s scalability and hyper-flexibility is facilitating new customer acquisition

Challenge

Solving the maintenance and optimization dilemma

As a SaaS provider, the volume of data Archimedia handles is increasing at an exponential rate. Its typical customer owns 16,000 high resolution images, and routinely selects 200 of them for immediate download and rendering at any given time. Its customers expect a software experience that is both rapid and reliable.

To keep its solution at the forefront of the industry, Archimedia was continually seeking ways to optimize its infrastructure. Initially, Archimedia ran its own servers in a colocated datacenter. However, the high costs of ownership and maintenance, compounded by the inability to grow with demand, and the very real fear of potential downtime and security threats left Archimedia scrambling for a better solution.

Factoring the true value of an infrastructure

Next, Archimedia tried virtual private servers (VPS), which came with both pros and cons. Since buying and maintaining servers was a headache it no longer wanted to deal with, a VPS was seen as a major step up. However, this option came with a significant drawback—the loss of precious processing power. Its VPS provided limited speed per core, which meant Archimedia had to pay for additional resources just to get the job done.

“That’s when I realized that what I really needed was a solution that would provide better performance on a per-resource basis,” says Archimedia’s president, Colin Rowe.

What’s more, because of cap rates on storage, Archimedia had to overprovision resources to accommodate the odd peak period. In Archimedia’s line of business, being able to negotiate a huge account without having to worry about capacity can make or break a sale. A VPS simply couldn’t offer Archimedia the flexibility to scale resources, or the performance it needed.

When customer support becomes a liability

Archimedia moved to yet another solution: third-party dedicated servers. It found a service provider and spent thousands of dollars in set-up fees. Just as it was about to transition, Archimedia had a couple of dealings with the provider’s India-based support agents, only to find that there was a major communication hurdle.

“It wasn’t going to work for me, because my hand just wasn’t held,” says Rowe. “I’ll soon have up to 3,000 users on the system at any given time, so if those servers are down, that can create a serious nightmare.”

Afraid of not getting the level of support he needed, Rowe decided that the risk was too great and halted the whole operation just as Archimedia was set to go live.

Solution

Leveraging the cost-performance value of the fastest servers in the industry

Archimedia then turned to SherWeb Performance Cloud and found exactly what it needed. Today, the company is leveraging the fastest servers in the industry, with a performance-per-resource that ensures its competitiveness.

“I’ve finally found the sweet spot for performance with SherWeb. The servers are very fast and very stable regardless of workload,” says Rowe, who is now processing operations 7 times faster than with his old VPS. “The entire experience is seamless and the support is quick and knowledgeable.”

Results

With value being a function of price and performance, Archimedia says its biggest gain is clearly its ability to extract more value from its resources before it has to scale up. While some of its competitors use Amazon Web Services, which also provides scalability and redundancy, Amazon’s infrastructure is not nearly as efficient. Archimedia’s ability to go much further with the same resources is also its greatest financial gain and the key to remaining among the top-rated solutions in its industry.

Archimedia estimates further savings of $7,500 a year in maintenance alone over the dedicated server or colocation option; a figure it expects to increase as the company expands. Thanks to the pay-per-use model of SherWeb’s solution, it no longer has to overprovision storage—resulting in an additional several thousands of dollars of savings annually. With SherWeb experts handling the infrastructure and in-house technical support available within seconds, Archimedia now saves as much as 8 hours each week, which it can now dedicate to its customer experience.