Whether you’re looking to strengthen your abs or shed a few pounds, everybody needs motivation and support. That’s why millions of people get fit with Beachbody. We sell some of the most popular fitness and nutrition products, including the well-known P90X®, T-25®, and Insanity® programs. To help people achieve their health and fitness goals, we’ve built a vast network of independent fitness coaches, along with an online support community.
Business has been growing at an awesome clip—last year alone we processed more than 10 million transactions—and some of our critical systems struggled to keep up. We depend on outside providers for parts of our e-commerce platform, while other pieces of the platform run inside our own infrastructure. At times, it was a challenge to maintain consistent performance across our 24/7 online presence.
We are actively changing that paradigm by bringing back more e-commerce in-house. A big piece of that is our next-generation infrastructure that gives us better performance, scalability, and reliability. After considering several vendors, we chose EMC® VSPEX® reference architecture based on VNX2® unified storage, Cisco UCS servers, and VMware. We also selected EMC Isilon® scale-out storage for our NAS requirements. It’s been a great investment for us so far!
Since deploying VNX2 and Isilon, we went from 400 to 1,500 virtual machines in nine months. That was essential for running all the new applications we’ve brought in-house. And the reason we could move so quickly was the ease of adding storage capacity on VNX2. We can just pop in a disk shelf and we’re ready to go. And Isilon lets us scale both capacity and performance almost instantly, which is critical as video changes to 4K ultra-high definition resolution and file sizes balloon. With EMC, we’re becoming more fleet of foot in handling our rapid growth.
Application performance is better, too. For example, performance of many of our core applications has doubled. We also like the versatility of multiple storage tiers. If our database needs more performance, we simply throw together a flash tier on VNX2 or add flash to the existing flash tier and the system will automatically move hot portions of the database onto it. And file services and NFS are at least twice as fast on Isilon compared to our old NAS storage platform.
We are also seeing improvement in our overall uptime. That’s extremely important for our e-commerce systems. Everyone at Beachbody benefits from better availability with reduced planned maintenance windows. And thanks to VNX2, we have the performance and capacity to clone VMs and keep applications running during maintenance.
As Beachbody continues to grow, we know we can rely on VNX2 and Isilon to pump out the performance and capacity we need to support our business and customers.