Cloud services provider increases data center capacity, performance to support growing customer demand

Cornerstone’s cloud services help organizations maximize workforce potential, develop skills and manage the employee life cycle from hiring to retirement. The company has grown at a rate of 60 percent per year since 2007, with a subscriber base that has more than doubled over the past two years. Cornerstone needed to replace its legacy EMC infrastructure to ensure around-the-clock application performance for its more than 10.5 million worldwide subscribers. It also needed to reduce time-intensive data center maintenance to avoid service disruptions.

By upgrading to HP 3PAR StoreServ Storage, Cornerstone was able to quadruple its data center capacity and performance without increasing infrastructure footprint or energy costs. As a result, subscribers experience consistent application access, even as demand escalates. Additionally, the company achieved faster response times via a 20 percent reduction in latency. This performance gain has significantly diminished risk of downtime and increased Cornerstone’s business continuity by reducing backup time by 90 percent.

“Cornerstone OnDemand needed a storage solution that could seamlessly accommodate the company’s global growth while mitigating data center administration time and complexities,” said Justin Ferris, senior director, Technical Operations, Cornerstone OnDemand. “The level of scalability and performance delivered by HP 3PAR StoreServ Storage enables our business to grow without ongoing hardware upgrades or intensive maintenance to ensure superior customer satisfaction.”

In addition to improving capacity and performance, the HP 3PAR StoreServ P10000 Storage system deployed at Cornerstone has reduced data center management time by 20 hours per week. Systemwide striping, a function of the system’s enterprise-class architecture, automatically writes data across all system resources to increase throughput. As a result, workloads are automatically balanced across all resources, ensuring optimal performance under constantly shifting demands.

HP 3PAR StoreServ also offers high system redundancy, via multiple controllers, allowing Cornerstone to perform maintenance any time without impacting workflow.

Cornerstone also has reduced administration time with HP 3PAR Thin Provisioning Software, which automates the rapid “thinning” of storage volumes by identifying and removing unused pockets of disk capacity. As a result, traditional storage volumes are reduced by 50 percent or more, and converted into thin-provisioned volumes on Cornerstone’s HP 3PAR StoreServ Storage system. The significant increase in capacity utilization as compared to its legacy EMC storage infrastructure has reduced Cornerstone’s storage footprint and power consumption while also mitigating its need for future hardware investments.

When future growth requires additional hardware, Cornerstone can implement and provision HP servers with HP Converged Storage solutions, core components of HP Converged Infrastructure, twice as fast as it could with its legacy EMC architecture.

In the near term, Cornerstone plans to implement HP 3PAR Remote Copy and HP 3PAR Virtual Copy software at its disaster recovery sites to provide instant point-in-time data snapshots for rapid application recovery.

Value-added solutions from HP Financial Services enabled Cornerstone to expand the reach and impact of its technology budget while providing the flexibility needed to quickly upgrade to the HP 3PAR StoreServ Storage solution.

Cornerstone worked with its preferred reseller partner Softchoice, an HP Direct Marketing Specialist under the HP PartnerOne program. Softchoice assisted Cornerstone in configuring, quoting and delivering HP Converged Infrastructure solutions to the company.

“To meet expanding data-growth demands, organizations require scalable storage solutions that deliver high performance levels with minimal administration,” said Chris Riley, vice president, U.S., Storage, HP. “HP 3PAR StoreServ Storage enables Cornerstone OnDemand to grow without data capacity or management limitations so its clients receive the best possible service.”