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SolidFire Success Story

We Deliver What Businesses Need for Breakthrough Deliveries

KEY HIGHLIGHTS

IndustryOnline postage software solutions

The Solution• 13 mixed-node SF3010 and SF9010

clusters and 7-node SF9010

Benefits• Automated management• Guaranteed performance and

consistent low latency• High availability and zero down-

time upgrades, zero downtime maintenance

• Scale-out• Encryption

A trusted partner of the U.S. Postal Service since 1987, Endicia supplies leading elec-tronic postage software solutions that have helped thousands of businesses print more than $11 billion in postage. Edicia’s best-in-class shipping solutions saves big dollars for businesses whose revenue depends on a 24/7 ability to print shipping labels faster, and for less cost.

How Endicia became the fastest, most reliable in the businessAn old-school approach to growing a storage system disrupted what Endicia’s global customers could accomplish. No one can afford lost productivity due to controller upgrades. Since shipping never sleeps, Endicia realized the need for a next generation storage solution that eliminated downtime and delivered the fastest response times.

According to Mitul Patel, IT manager and senior architect, “I wanted to eliminate bottlenecks and use a technology that

provided submillisecond response times, maximized customer uptime, and allowed management without customer service consequences. Only SolidFire delivered all three, which allows us to grow our business seamlessly without taking the business down. That’s unheard of.”

What this means to Endicia’s customersThousands of businesses, from small to huge (think Amazon and USPS) can inte-grate into a seamless workflow. Endicia’s award-winning software now generates shipping labels and prints postage with significantly reduced effort, time, and cost thanks to the reliability of its underlying storage infrastructure.

Internal stakeholders matter, too. For its internal user base of developers and internal systems, Endicia deployed SolidFire to launch a solution that offers unprece-dented infrastructure performance without sacrificing anyone’s needs.

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“SolidFire is an all-flash array. We know we’re going to consistently get faster response times. I don’t have to segregate applications on it; I don’t have to think about it. It helps us in terms of planning and the resources and time required to maintain it.”Mitul Patel Endicia IT Manager and Senior Architect

The Whole StoryWith over 25 years of leadership and innovation in electronic postage software solutions, Palo Alto-based Endicia is dedicated to delivering value by creating breakthrough shipping technologies and services that have helped thousands of global businesses reach their customers. Endicia’s electronic postage solutions make it easier, faster, and more affordable to ship through the U.S. Postal Service®.

Endicia’s broad network of more than 200 e-commerce partners enables integration with customers’ shipping workflows and processes for generating shipping labels and printing postage. It offers solutions, tools, and APIs for developers to directly integrate its award-winning products with customers’ e-commerce software systems, shipping applications, and databases. Endicia offers seamless access to USPS shipping services by allowing customers to buy and print postage online.

With SolidFire’s all-flash scale-out platform, Endicia has the storage architecture to support the growth of its business and the agility to meet challenges and burgeoning

IT needs as they arise. And that means Endicia is positioned to maintain its posi-tion as a leading provider of e-commerce shipping technologies and services.

Seamless scaling drives business growthAs business grew, Endicia’s legacy storage area network started to bump into performance and capacity limits. That’s when Mitul began to consider an all-flash storage option, particularly for its ability to handle a higher rate of transactions.

“The big problem I faced is I couldn’t keep up with demand,” Mitul said. “I would add more storage and by the time I added it, it was gone.”

Endicia’s growth plans demanded a technology that could meet its current storage needs while simultaneously offering the potential to expand for the future. SolidFire has enabled Endicia to build an integrated, automated data center that allows the company to add storage performance and capacity at any time without interrupting the shipping process for its customers. “Endicia’s infrastructure has a direct impact on our customers’ experience,” Mitul added.

“Every performance improvement we make and everything we do to help the customer speed up their process in turn helps them save time and money.”

Scaling operations without suffering storage downtime used to be one of Mitul’s primary concerns. “I used to worry about the ability to scale and grow to meet our customers’ needs in a 24/7 environment. With SolidFire, we can add nodes and simply manage flexible pools of capacity and performance,” he said.

“We can take nodes away and put them in a different cluster if we want. We can grow the business without taking the business down.”

Constantly meeting customer needsWhile maintenance of some flash storage systems necessitates service interruptions, SolidFire has enabled Endicia to build a 24/7 infrastructure that maximizes customer uptime and allows Endicia engineers to manage changes within the SolidFire platform without impact to its service. With this capability, Endicia is equipped to meet its customer needs.

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“I wanted a technology that provided submillisecond response times, maximized customer uptime, and allowed management without customer service consequences. Only SolidFire delivered all three.”Mitul Patel Endicia IT Manager and Senior Architect

“Availability is very important to our customers because if our service goes down, our customers can’t print postage,” Mitul said. “With SolidFire, I don’t need a maintenance night to perform an upgrade, so there is no downtime for our custom-ers. Whatever time our customers want to do business, we are up and running.”

Improving customer satisfaction with Quality of ServiceEndicia’s IT teams were challenged to deliver increased storage performance and to back that performance with firm service-level agreements (SLAs) to its customers. “As our customer base has grown, so have the required service-level agreements. The ability to guarantee qual-ity of service to every customer became a major requirement for Endicia’s future infrastructure investment,” Mitul said.

A critical factor in Endicia’s decision to use SolidFire was the guarantee that latency will remain consistently low over time, enabling a seamless customer experience and sustainable service levels. Only SolidFire was able to deliver and guarantee the fine-grain Quality of Service (QoS) needed for Endicia’s highly transactional business. “The low latency in a transactional database has to be consistent because that’s what drives our SLA; that’s what drives performance,” Mitul said. “With solid-state drives (SSD), I’m going to get fast response. It’s a huge advantage.”

Safeguarding customer dataEndicia is entrusted with sensitive customer data, and protecting that data was top of mind when the company

chose SolidFire as its storage solution. SolidFire enables Endicia to encrypt its drives and the data associated with them without suffering any negative impact on performance. “It’s absolutely critical that we protect sensitive data,” Mitul said.

“With SolidFire, we know our data is safe; there’s no possibility of a breach of data.”