Case Study: Constant Contact achieves millions of messages per minute and lower costs with DataStax Enterprise

Constant Contact Tracks Millions of Messages Per Minute with Datastax

Constant Contact, a provider of online marketing tools to more than half a million small businesses, faced a growing data challenge: their legacy IBM DB2 relational system could only retain historical detail for 90 days, but new email and social products required at least two years of data and much higher write throughput—all while keeping costs low for very small customers. Scaling and multi‑data center requirements made the existing platform impractical.

They migrated to DataStax Enterprise (Apache Cassandra) for speed, scalability, multi‑data center support and operational simplicity. Today Constant Contact runs six 72‑node clusters across two data centers to power content storage and activity tracking, cutting operational costs, boosting throughput to more than ten times their prior several‑million transactions‑per‑minute capacity, enabling easy scale on commodity hardware, and delivering continuous availability with plans to add analytics nodes and further growth.

Constant Contact

Dave Connors

Vice President of Operations