Case Study: Pantheon achieves highly available, scalable, no-single-point-of-failure media storage for Drupal with DataStax

Pantheon Systems - Customer Case Study

Pantheon Systems offers a cloud-based web development platform for Drupal sites used by customers from small consultancies to large organizations like UC Berkeley. Faced with the need to persist large volumes of platform and media data with high scale and availability—and to provide a multitenant, consistent file storage backend without a single point of failure—the company sought a low‑maintenance solution that could support continuous operations and easy scaling.

Pantheon built its core APIs and a chunked media storage system on Apache Cassandra, using a Twisted Python RESTful API and load balancers to enable upgrades without downtime. Cassandra’s replication, snapshotting, and ability to add nodes nondisruptively delivered the required durability and availability, simplified operations compared with MySQL, and unlocked new features such as user analytics and “power user” tracking—resulting in a resilient, scalable platform that keeps customer sites online even when nodes or links fail.

Pantheon

David Strauss

Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer, Pantheon Systems