Case Study: Photobucket achieves a streamlined cost model and greater business agility with Hitachi Vantara

Photobucket Pictures Better Business Efficiencies With Streamlined Cost Model and Hitachi Cloud Services

Photobucket, a leading online photo-hosting, sharing and printing service with about 100 million members and 60 million monthly unique visitors, faced rising storage complexity and costs from roughly 20 PB of NAS storage across three data centers and legacy architecture that limited product innovation. Seeking to move from capital-intensive capacity purchases to a flexible, consumption-based model, Photobucket engaged Hitachi Vantara and adopted Hitachi Cloud Services and Hitachi Content Platform (HCP) to simplify integration, secure original-size photos offsite, and reduce its data center footprint.

Hitachi Vantara delivered a single-vendor, fully managed cloud solution—Hitachi Cloud Services with HCP—implemented as a replicated dual-copy deployment across two data centers, providing pay-as-you-grow object storage, automated tiering, and enterprise-grade data protection. The move shifted Photobucket from heavy CapEx to predictable OpEx, reduced operating storage costs, preserved two copies of originals (protecting some 15 billion images), supported anticipated growth of about 1.8 PB per year, and freed the internal team to focus on product innovation rather than infrastructure.

Photobucket

Tom Munro

Chief Executive Officer