REA Group Picks EMC Centera

By Greg McNevin

July 20, 2007: Australian real estate advertising specialist the REA Group has picked EMC’s storage, software and services to manage the vast amount of data generated by its online property listings each month.

Based in Australia and owner of realestate.com.au, REA has recently expanded its services to countries around the globe. To aid with this expansion and the exponentially increasing levels of storage it requires, the company the deployed EMC’ Centera content-addressed storage system with its DiskXtender and EmailXtender software to archiving all files, emails and images over six months old.

By going with EMC, the company claims it has been able to cut its overall online storage requirements by over 250 percent.

“We were adding a terabyte of storage every six months due to our business growth and expanding databases that store massive image files of the properties that we post on our Web sites,” said Andrew Humphrey, IT Manager for REA. “We were also manually backing up four terabytes of data to a tape library every night. This took us 36 hours to do a backup, which put a great deal of stress on our Web sites and raised concerns about how long it would take to recover from an outage.”

Humphrey says that the new process compares files so the same files aren’t backed up over and over again, reducing duplication so much that amount of information the firm needed to store online was reduced by 70 percent. “We now store about four terabytes of data, but that would be about eight terabytes without EMC Centera,” said Humphrey.

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