Amazon EBS is committed to providing an easy to use, high performance block storage solution for virtually any application you want to run in the cloud, while delivering the scalability and predictable economics of the cloud so that you can unlock maximum value from your deployments on AWS. With Amazon EBS, you get the reliability, security, performance, and continuous innovation that is needed to modernize for the future, making Amazon EBS the ideal choice for running your business-critical workloads. Read these stories that highlight how customers across a broad range of verticals are using Amazon EBS to unlock performance and cost-savings.
Performance and Cost Optimization
Devo achieves 20% reduction in costs by migrating to Amazon EBS gp3 volumes, while maintaning sub-millisecond query response times
Devo also leverages Amazon EBS Elastic Volumes to dynamically increase performance with no downtime during period of high demand. If their application demand exceeds the lower cost HDD-backed EBS st1 volume credit, Devo modifies the volume type to gp3, keeping volume size consistent, to obtain higher IOPS that can meet peak loads. Once the peak declines and credits are available again, Devo switches back to st1 volumes.
AWS has helped us grow from a five-person startup to a truly global company. There wouldn’t be Devo without AWS.
Tony Le, Director of Cloud Partnerships, Devo
iPatientCare improves application performance by 40% with Amazon EBS
iPatientCare is a pioneer in cloud-based ambulatory EHR, revenue cycle management services, integrated practice management, and patient engagement solutions. iPatientCare uses Microsoft SQL Server on AWS with data storage on Elastic Block Store that played a significant role in improving entire application performance by 40%. Our maintenance and deployment activities are getting carried out faster than ever before with noteworthy reduction in operational cost by 60%.
Shripal Shah, Senior Technology Officer, iPatientCare
Repricer Express moves to AWS from Azure for lower costs, higher performance
Repricer Express uses Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) with provisioned IOPS solid state drives (SSDs) for high-performance block storage. The flexibility of Amazon EBS enables RepricerExpress to find a better fit between its architecture and its applications. "By taking advantage of the high-performance SSD option for Amazon EBS, we designed a storage platform that aligned closely to the data access patterns of our applications," says Elder. "This Amazon EBS option will help us reduce costs and deliver even stronger application availability."
Axinom Cuts Costs with Amazon EBS and Amazon EC2 Spot
Axinom, a leading provider of digital solutions to the media and entertainment industry, struggled to scale their Content Management System (CMS) and Digital Rights Management (DRM) solutions to keep up with increasing user traffic while running SQL Server in an on-premises data center. Rather than rewrite these applications, Axinom migrated their SQL Server-based application environment to AWS for better scalability and flexibility. In so doing, Axinom cut costs for supporting their digital media supply chain services by 70 percent using Amazon EC2 Spot Instances, enabling them to offer more competitive pricing for their customers, according to Axinom’s Chief Technology Officer, Johannes Jauch. In addition, AWS helps customers like Axinom cut costs with Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) General Purpose SSD (gp2) volumes that deliver single-digit millisecond latencies and the ability to burst to 3,000 IOPS for extended periods, particularly well-suited to SQL Server workloads.
Bristol Myers Squibb uses Amazon EBS volumes to increase performance and cost savings while using AWS Storage Gateway
In their internal testing, Bristol Myers Squib found that General Purpose SSD block storage (gp2 EBS volumes) is a good option for Storage Gateway for datasets of small-to-medium files sizes (1 MB to 1 GB), with negligible impact on performance. They use Provisioned IOPS SSD (io1) for larger data sets and saw similar results. By using the right types of volumes that met their needs, potential savings can be up to 40%, which can be substantial in many life science applications.
ProtectWise enables stateless storage architecture and 95% reduction in storage costs, using Amazon EBS and Amazon S3 for their Apache Cassandra deployment
Using Amazon S3 and Amazon EBS has significantly reduced costs for ProtectWise. “Our savings per unit of data has gone down an average of 30 percent per month over the last two years,” says Josh Hollander, director of platform development at ProtectWise. “Using AWS, we have reduced our storage costs by 95 percent, meaning we are spending $1 for every $20 we would have spent on a traditional system.” ProtectWise increased performance at the same time.
Our solution built using Amazon S3 and Amazon EBS ingests 50 terabytes of compressed network data and metadata each day, adding up now to many petabytes of stored data. We can search all that data with response times of 1 to 3 seconds. Nobody else in the security industry can do this. It blows our customers away.
Gene Stevens, Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer, ProtectWise
Viasat Boosts Analytics Performance Using Amazon EBS for its Kafka cluster
“Adopting Amazon EBS st1 volumes smoothed out I/O performance for high-throughput data capture, improving the availability of our monitoring dashboards without increasing our storage cost.” The team has also realized several other benefits. “Using Amazon EBS st1 volumes gave us the flexibility to choose instance sizes independent of I/O considerations,” says Woodlins. “Maintenance is faster, because we can reattach drives as needed instead of having to deploy and rebalance a new, empty server. We were also able to reduce the number of default replicas of our cluster from three to two because of the redundancy built into EBS volumes.”
In addition, Viasat noted that using Amazon EBS st1 volumes enabled it to saturate instance I/O to the limit on the machine, resulting in maximum utilization and no need to overprovision. The company plans to move more of its data storage to Amazon EBS st1 volumes. “Tests with our Hadoop workloads have shown great results,” says Woodlins. “Our long-term plan is to move them from Amazon EBS d2 instance store to st1 drives.” With the capability and flexibility of AWS Cloud storage, Viasat can continue to drive broadband innovation and performance ever higher.
Videology accelerates performance and cost savings for Hadoop clusters with Amazon EBS
To address its performance and cost challenges, Videology specifically decided to deploy Amazon EBS Throughput Optimized (st1) volumes. These low-cost, persistent, block-level storage volumes use hard disk drives (HDDs) along with Amazon EC2 instances to deliver high-throughput storage for Videology’s big-data workload. “We were able to save $15,000 per month, increase our available storage by 5%, and turn off eight server nodes by moving to Amazon EBS st1 volumes to support our Hadoop cluster,” said David Ortiz, Sr. Software Engineer.
Scale and Agility
Equifax scales storage easily with Amazon EBS
Equifax addressed its scalability and performance issues by moving its entire Oracle application suite to Amazon Web Services (AWS), running on hundreds of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances and using Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) for persistent block level storage. Equifax initially migrated its ERP and Hyperion solutions to AWS, and then migrated the Oracle BRM application to the cloud in a second phase. The company’s applications run on more than 850 vCPUs, storing over 100 TB of data across approximately 350 Amazon EBS volumes “AWS is the right technology for us because it enables us to scale horizontally and vertically,” says Tulsian. Equifax worked with AWS partner Cloudreach during the migration and employed AWS CloudEndure Migration to simplify, expedite, and automate large-scale migration of the Oracle BRM.
Dow Jones provisions petabytes of data in seconds using Amazon EBS
Dow Jones is a global provider of news and business information, delivering content to consumers and organizations around the world across multiple formats, including print, digital, mobile, and live events. The customer's global news database Factiva contains more than 1.9 billion articles going back over 30 years, and continues to grow every day. With Amazon EBS, Dow Jones is able to provision multiple petabytes of data for Factiva in seconds. This has greatly reduced the time Dow Jones needs to spin up an application. The pay-as-you-go model also gives the customer the ability to experiment and validate without commitment.
Unlike on-premises systems where we buy capacity based on forecasted demand, Amazon EBS Elastic Volumes let us scale size or IOPS for a volume online as our needs grow. This has reduced our overall TCO, helping us leverage our resources towards other strategic initiatives.
Naren Dharma, VP of Engineering, Dow Jones
Experian gains robust data access, scaling, and security using Amazon EBS
Experian, a leading credit bureau and household name in credit monitoring, uses Amazon EBS for various tasks. All the front-end analytics applications—such as SAS, RStudio, JupyterHub, H2O, and Tableau—run on Amazon EC2 backed by Amazon EBS gp2 volumes, which give the platform the best balance of price and performance. Backups using Amazon EBS Snapshots were also a selling point. Experian can restore its fully provisioned Amazon EBS volumes in minutes using the Amazon EBS Fast Snapshot Restore capability. The feature also lets the company automate and standardize how it launches instances by taking snapshots for each virtual machine and replicating it, using that image to create multiple instances of the node.
Amazon EBS enables us to add more data and quickly expand the volume of the data. That is a huge game changer for us in how we react to market conditions.
Moied Wahid, Vice President of Ascend Platform Engineering, Experian
Pix Systems scales storage capacity by 16 times at about half the cost
The flexibility of AWS allows PIX to easily switch from Amazon EBS Magnetic volumes, which had a limit of 1 TB, to new throughput-optimized SC1 hard disk drive (HDD) volumes, which allow for up to 16 TB, at roughly half the cost. “The SC1 volumes have been amazing for us because the savings has allowed us to move from a ‘RAIDed’ environment, and the performance has been marvelous,” says Elliott Freis, principal engineer at PIX. “Effectively, it was no different from running on magnetic—if not better—for the same cost.”
Hess accelerates migration of 300 servers with scalable storage from Amazon EBS
Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) attached to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances provides block level storage for almost 500 TB of data. Provisioned IOPS volumes for storage in conjunction with instances optimized for EBS provide consistent and low-latency performance for servers with more strenuous IO demands. In extreme cases, provisioned IOPS volumes were configured as a RAID array to increase performance. Hess also uses EBS Snapshots to back up their EBS volumes.
Jump! is a startup focusing on the design and deployment of efficient deep learning networks on smartphones. The innovative technology accelerating neural networks is designed by Jump! to bring artificial intelligence and machine learning to smartphones and improve user experience.
We use Amazon EC2 P3 instances and EBS block storage service to develop network compression methods for accelerating the inference of neural networks. These AWS products allow us to run such compute-intensive tasks as image classification and investigation of large scale deep learning networks.”
Yawei Li, Chief Scientist
Backup and Restore with Snapshots
J&J delivers compliance at scale while achieving annual cost savings of $1M
Johnson & Johnson (J&J), one of the world’s leading healthcare companies with more than 140,000 employees and contractors worldwide. As J&J experienced exponential business growth, it needed a simple, low-cost solution to archive data of workers’ virtual desktops to meet compliance and legal regulations, with requirements for a retention period of more than 20 years.
To assure compliance, J&J uses Amazon EBS Snapshots to store copies of associates’ virtual desktops. For long-term storage of rarely-accessed snapshots that do not need frequent or fast retrieval, J&J migrates over 100,000 existing snapshots into Amazon EBS Snapshots Archive—a new storage tier offers up to 75 percent lower snapshot storage costs for snapshots that are stored for 90 days or longer and that rarely require access.
Amazon EBS Snapshots Archive not only meets our technical and compliance requirements, but also ensures that our cost for storage of snapshots is sustainable for years to come.
Gaurav Kapoor, Senior Manager, Johnson & Johnson
Arcesium achieves seamless backup and speedy database refreshes
Arcesium, a global financial technology and professional services firm, recognized that speedier database refreshes would benefit its clients. Using Amazon EBS Snapshots and Amazon EBS Fast Snapshot Restore, the company facilitated refreshes of up to 30 multiterabyte environments within the weekend time window while successfully reducing refresh costs by 58 percent and refresh time by 59 percent. Moreover, Arcesium discovered that it could use the joint solution for database backups. Arcesium can pause the input/output while taking the backups, and it no longer needs to stop the database. When restoring from EBS Snapshots, the target incurs a downtime of only 10–15 minutes, versus 15–20 hours for a traditional backup/restore for large databases.
Using application-consistent Amazon EBS Snapshots as database backups would be really helpful for any AWS customers running databases on top of Amazon EC2 instances.
Manikantan Madhunapantula, Associate Director and Head of the Database Engineering Group, Arcesium
TransferWise grows globally by migrating financial applications to AWS
TransferWise is a global financial technology company working to develop better ways to move money around the world. TransferWise used the Tape Gateway mode of AWS Storage Gateway to replace tape backups and then transitioned to writing database backups to a Volume Gateway. This in turn created Amazon EBS Snapshots that were managed by the AWS Backup service. As a result, TransferWise was able to close its recovery data center in the Netherlands. Once the company’s databases were being backed up to AWS, TransferWise began to use those backups to migrate its databases.
We realized quickly that using Volume Gateway and Amazon EBS Snapshots was an effective way to get the data robustly into AWS. It was a simple way of doing the migration that worked with our database team’s existing processes and knowledge.
Thomas Hewer, Technology Lead, TransferWise
Kellogs uses EBS Snapshots as part of their backup workflows for SAP
In this full-length episode of AWS Coffee Break, Abdul Mohammed, Senior IT Architect at Kellogg Company talks about Kellogg's migration to AWS, minimizing backup costs, and hybrid cloud storage architectures.
Hess Corporation uses EBS Snapshots to prevent data loss
“Snapshots covered us for both server failures and accidental data deletion or corruption,” says McDonald. “We took advantage of the ability to easily copy snapshots within the same Region to another AWS Region by using the Amazon EC2 console, Amazon EC2 command line interface (CLI) tools, or an API. We used snapshot copies to create backups of data and to create new Amazon EBS volumes and standard Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) running Microsoft Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008.”
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