Case Study: Excite Japan Co., Ltd. achieves 300% performance boost and 50% infrastructure cost savings with NetApp SolidFire all‑flash storage

Built a Private Cloud Infrastructure with All-Flash Storage, Achieving a Low-Cost, Agile Service Foundation

Excite Japan, a long-running operator of online portals, needed to modernize its service infrastructure to speed new releases and reduce costs. Its seven‑person Infrastructure Section wanted a self‑service private cloud because public cloud options couldn’t meet cost and strict I/O/performance requirements, and disk-based storage had forced some applications onto dedicated servers.

They built a Red Hat OpenStack private cloud backed by NetApp SolidFire all‑flash storage, unifying databases and applications on a scalable, QoS‑capable platform. This enabled the AI recommendation engine “wisteria” to meet heavy I/O demands, eliminated many dedicated servers, boosted performance by 300% versus the prior public cloud, and cut infrastructure costs by 50%, freeing engineers to focus on core work.

Excite Japan Co., Ltd.

Takashi Fukuda

Infrastructure Section, Infrastructure Department