StackWorld 2016 Awards
Dreamhost (with a little help from atmail) won a StackWorld 2016 ScaleUp award for its new, open-souce, cloud computing platform Dreamcompute!
The StackWorld 2016 ScaleUp Awards publish the 25 top nominations for technologies that have enabled customers to scale up fast. Nominees were asked to submit a customer story about how their technology enabled a customer to achieve incredible scale.
Here is that story:
After pioneering one of the world’s first commercial webmail products in 1998, atmail has remained a global leader and innovator in enterprise email messaging. Maintaining this position was at the forefront of their minds as they searched for a cloud-based email solution that offered freedom in scalability while also reducing the complexity of their operations. After much deliberation, they selected DreamHost’s ground-breaking cloud computing platform, DreamCompute.
For atmail it was the synergies in vision they shared with DreamHost in recognizing cloud as the future of email – as well as the unlimited opportunities the software offered – that led to them implementing DreamCompute. As a gravitational shift within the industry has already seen large numbers of clients looking to migrate from resource-heavy on-premises installations to cost effective cloud solutions, it was imperative that atmail’s new cloud platform be adapted to meet the varied needs of all of their customers (who include first tier ISPs, telecommunications companies, HSPs, partnering vendors, global corporations & government agencies).
atmail currently services over 30 million paid mailboxes for 4,500 customers in over 90 countries. Historically, if they wanted to scale or on-board cloud customers, they were tied to purchasing additional dedicated servers. Through a process that was completely counterintuitive to an agile, extendable cloud environment, atmail ran their own dedicated servers on bare metal, based on ‘sharded’ architecture. This process was both expensive and difficult to scale.
In contrast, DreamCompute has offered them the ability to drastically simplify and automate this process. DreamCompute uses virtual machines (VMs), making it easy to spin up new instances of atmail when needed. The modular architecture of DreamCompute makes it much simpler to increase capacity, and the move from bare metal to VMs has also made management much easier. At the same time, DreamCompute’s use of SSDs and embedded cloud storage technologies has delivered atmail a significant boost in performance.
According to atmail, the most surprising impact of their move to DreamCompute (and their newfound capability to scale at will) has been the opportunity to re-engage with and approach new customers knowing they can now confidently quote large sale email solutions and deliver on those commitments simply and efficiently. After only one year from development to deployment, atmail has successfully migrated 10% of their 30 million email account base to the DreamCompute platform, representing a massive 40% of the company’s revenue. They have also started work to meet aggressive targets for rapid growth, doubling the number of email accounts on the cloud-based system year-over-year for the next two years, and jumping to 20% of all accounts in the next year and 40% the year after that.
atmail CTO, Ben Duncan, says: “It’s staggering to see the impact DreamCompute has already had on our business in terms of TCO and scalability, we can’t wait to see what’s possible for our future!”
View the full story (along with the other 24 winners) here:
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