Case Study: Backupify

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“Eliminating downtime ensures we can backup customer data around the clock. And since we have reliable, redundant and scalable low-balance data storage, if a node goes down for any reason, Cassandra just retries another one.” - Matt Conway, Backupify

Company: Backupify

Overview: Backupify is a cloud-based utility that enables businesses and consumers to backup, search and restore the content of popular online applications such as Google Apps, Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, Blogger and others – essentially backing up the cloud into another cloud. The company’s data protection service provides customers with an extra layer of insurance against unintentional or malicious data deletion, and makes regulatory compliance easierfor many.

As of September 2011, the Cambridge, Mass.-based company was storing more than 200 terabytes of data for more than 175,000 users – primarily backing up data in Google Apps accounts such as Gmail and Google Docs. “Google Apps is where most business data resides that users want to protect, so that is a primary focus for us,” says Matt Conway, Backupify’s vice president of engineering. “But keeping up with it all takes work. Gmail is especially difficult because there’s so much data to protect.”

Data Size: 21+ clusters

Challenge: The need for a database that can scale horizontally according to rapidly changing data storage needs, handle extremely high write-loads, raliably back up data on a set schedule, and manage the data sharding process

Solution: The elastically scalable Apache Cassandra™ platform, which allows Backupify to store, in the cloud, massive amounts of active data coming from the cloud, and provides no single point of failure.