Datrium, the industry's leading open convergence platform for hybrid clouds, announced today that its solutions are helping Competitor Group Inc. (CGI) solve performance challenges created by the company's growing need for private cloud storage.

As the leading global media and event entertainment company dedicated to promoting an active lifestyle, CGI runs some of the nation's largest sporting events, including the Rock'n'Roll Marathon races, the next of which takes places in Las Vegas Nov. 12-13. Each event draws up to 60,000 registrants. CGI also publishes Competitor, Triathlete, Velo and Women's Running magazines, and operates the Competitor Endurance Sports Network, an active lifestyle digital network. CGI captures data on active individuals through RaceIt, its event registration platform hosted on its private cloud. Data from event signups and media subscriptions, along with video from events, created explosive growth for CGI's storage needs.

Faster Business Results
"Our storage needs were growing daily and performance was lagging with data-intensive applications for video editors and analytics," said Bobby Phimmasane, director of information technology, Competitor Group. "When our partners at VPLS Solutions showed us that Datrium was effectively running laps around our current system, we knew we had a winner for our vSphere environment."

Once Datrium DVX was deployed, CGI noticed an immediate boost in video editing and data analysis application performance, where a doubling of speed delivered business results in a fraction of the time. CGI also found an added measure of performance by running Datrium's Insane Mode, which accelerates VM performance at the touch of a button. The company now runs its Datrium DVX environment exclusively in the accelerated mode.

Lower CapEx and No Storage Management
With many businesses looking for converged infrastructure alternatives that avoid the rigidity of traditional storage, Datrium's open convergence solution provides an elastic, predictable infrastructure for companies like CGI. In addition to performance benefits, Datrium's capacity efficiency and VM-centric management made it a better and simpler alternative to other solutions CGI considered. And unlike hyperconverged infrastructure approaches, CGI was able to incorporate its existing HPE blade servers into the Datrium open convergence platform, reducing deployment costs and transforming the blade servers into flash-based compute instances.

The solution further lowered costs by freeing up terabytes of capacity, which reduced CGI's data footprint by 80 percent. Built-in compression and deduplication led to a 5.6-to-1 data reduction. CGI plans to consolidate more data on Datrium to further lower its footprint.

"I like the simplicity of Datrium," Phimmasane says. "We no longer have to deal with LUNs (logical unit numbers). In vCenter, we can observe performance at the VM, move them around as necessary, and do any other troubleshooting simply. And the graphs are crisp and modern."

"Cloud-based applications, like Competitor Group's RaceIt, need a data platform for their VMs that is as elastic as their own demand, while supporting their freedom to use best of breed computing," said Brian Biles, CEO and founder of Datrium. "By converging existing blade server infrastructure with Datrium DVX, CGI achieved business results faster, reduced IT spend, and virtually eliminated storage management."

Case Study: Leading Sports Media Company Doubles Its Speed, Gains 5x Capacity