Zappos considers themselves an online services company that “happens to sell” products, so providing an optimal customer experience on its web site is a top priority.

To keep up with projected holiday traffic increases, Kris Ongbongan, Systems Administration Manager, knew Zappos would have to upgrade. He began searching for options that could ensure positive customer experience with minimal impact on his IT department’s overhead.

During his system analysis, Kris identified two areas where Zappos needed to upgrade performance in order to handle increased loads:

• Product databases. The databases containing product information would need to be able to handle many more concurrent users.
• Web cache. Zappos cached the HTML for many pages to improve load times and by extension the customer experience. It wanted the capacity to store many more of these fast-loading pages.

Amazingly, the IBM High IOPS SSD PCIe Adapter powered by Fusion-io technology allowed Zappos to surpass its projected performance capacity needs while actually reducing maintenance.