In the age of digital photography, Photobucket stands as a beacon for preserving cherished memories. Founded in 2003 and headquartered in Denver, CO, Photobucket has become a global leader in online photo hosting, sharing and printing services. With more than 100 million members and 60 million unique global visitors per month, the company has cemented its position as a trusted platform for individuals of all ages to upload, edit, browse, print and share their photos.
The success of Photobucket doesn't rest solely on its commitment to preserving memories, but also on its ability to adapt to the fast-paced cloud storage landscape. In a world where flexibility and agility are paramount, Photobucket found a reliable partner in Hitachi Vantara. Together, they've embarked on a journey to not only meet the evolving needs of their customers but also streamline operations and enhance their storage infrastructure.
Tom Munro, the CEO of Photobucket, emphasizes the importance of their partnership with Hitachi in achieving these objectives. "We must always be ready to transform and align in this fast-moving market. Being able to rapidly make changes is essential to our success.”
He adds that the partnership with Hitachi enables Photobucket to focus on its customers, keep its data center footprint to a minimum and move to big stair-step capital expenditure purchases, all of which are extremely important priorities for the company.
Transforming Photos to Treasures
One of Photobucket's key offerings is the Print Shop, which allows users to transform their photos into unique treasures, ranging from blankets and canvas prints to photo books and calendars. Photobucket also has a mobile app, which empowers users to store, edit, create GIFs and share their memories anytime and anywhere.
The company's pursuit of excellence in digital services earned it the Gold Award from Top Ten REVIEWS, an independent product reviews company. This prestigious accolade recognizes Photobucket as the top performer in its product and service category, based on the attributes of performance, features, ease of use and overall quality.
Focused on the Big Picture: Cloud Services
With the popularity of its many services comes the responsibility of managing vast amounts of data. Photobucket's colossal data storage requirements, approximately 20PB across three main data centers, presented a significant challenge. It needed to transition from a capital expenditure-based model to an operational expenditure-based one, while ensuring data security, availability and scalability.
To begin that process, Photobucket’s CTO contacted Trace3, a solution provider and Photobucket’s trusted advisor. Next, Photobucket IT contacted Hitachi Vantara regarding its cloud capabilities and asked the Hitachi team to work with Trace3 to develop a solution.
Michael Clark, Chief Technology Officer at Photobucket, elaborates on their partner journey. "We wanted to shift to a cost-effective consumption model with object-based interfaces, either on-premises or in the cloud. We needed to move away from the challenges of forecasting and making significant capacity purchases every quarter," he explains.
Hitachi Cloud Services, coupled with Hitachi Content Platform (HCP) for object storage, emerged as the chosen solution. Hitachi Cloud Services is a managed subscription service that allows Photobucket to pay month-to-month through a purely operational model.
The services are enterprise quality and allow application integration and off-site content archival of storage data assets. Integration with on-site assets is seamless and workflows automate storage tiering into the cloud for short-and longer-term retention. This all-cloud approach simplified Photobucket's data management, providing a cost-effective solution that allowed the company to focus on its core business—serving up digital photo services to customers.
Instant Access to Images
With this transition to Hitachi Cloud Services, Photobucket gained not only cost efficiencies but also the ability to manage substantial data growth. It could securely store original-size photos offsite and retain Web-sized images for customer retrieval. This strategic shift in data management allowed Photobucket to innovate more rapidly and offer an enhanced user experience.
Photobucket's journey with Hitachi Cloud Services is a testament to its commitment to preserving memories and leveraging the cloud to continuously expand and improve services. As Photobucket enters a brighter future with streamlined data management, it can remain dedicated to helping users capture, share and cherish their most treasured memories.
Image Credit: Photobucket