"The installation went very fast," he says of EarthLink's DMX deployment. "It was up and running within three days, and we had all the data on it within a week."
With more than 5 million subscribers, EarthLink obviously has huge storage needs on the service side of its business. (The company wouldn't say which vendor or vendors provide the storage for that side of the house.) But its internal corporate storage needs are also exploding, Williams says. In 2001, he says, the ISP stored 9 Tbytes of corporate data, which includes the data needed for building the systems that support the call center, customer databases, human resources databases, and data warehousing.
Today, with more than 5,000 employees on its payroll and data centers in Georgia and California, the company has to manage 40 Tbytes of corporate storage, Williams says. The carrier currently runs about 300 Sun servers and 200 Windows servers to handle its corporate data flow. In addition, the company has several Network Appliance Inc. (Nasdaq: NTAP) file servers.
Before this year, EarthLink wasn't much of an EMC shop. At the time the ISP started shopping around for its first big storage array a few years ago, EMC's Symmetrix was no match for the Sun StorEdge 9960, a rebranded version of HDS's Lightning 9960, Williams says.
"We were facing very rapid storage growth," he says. "We quickly outgrew the 9960. So we bought another one. Then we started outgrowing it."
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