Dell Storage: the perfect partner for growth

Social media continues to change the business landscape, and free social video service Keek is helping fuel the transition.

Keek logoHeadquartered in Toronto, Keek offers the world a free social video service that lets users share 36-second video updates (“keeks”) with the Keek community, Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr. Users follow, subscribe and respond to videos with either text comments or video replies ("keekbacks.") Keek is simple to use, extremely fast and 100% free. Keek is a leading app in more than 100 countries and has millions of highly engaged active users. The Keek app is available at the App Store and Google Play.

“Unlike our competitors, Keek’s community is logging a massive amount of original user generated videos and social activity,” says Isaac Raichyk, founder and CEO of Keek Inc. “Keek is growing like crazy. We’re adding millions of new users per month, so any downtime represents an opportunity lost.”

So how does a growing startup company make headway in a highly competitive market? One secret lies in strategic technology vendor relationships. A new Keek case study shows why Dell is the right partner for organizations of all sizes to support growth.

Zero unplanned downtime and streamlined maintenance

To give users the best possible performance, Keek is built on bleeding-edge open source technologies. To run them reliably, the IT staff wanted end-to-end hardware from a single vendor, and chose Dell. “Dell has always been reliable,” explains Jeremy Wilson, CTO of Keek Inc.

An infrastructure of Dell servers, EqualLogic storage and PowerConnect networking is delivering zero unplanned downtime. An EqualLogic FS7500 NAS appliance works with a backend EqualLogic PS Series group as a unified storage solution. As Keek’s storage needs grow and change with the business, the IT team can easily scale the unified system for both capacity and performance without disrupting the storage system or applications – adding arrays on the fly for more capacity, or more NAS appliances for increased performance that supports file growth.

Fast responses and high performance

Scaling up is transparent to users. The company can support fast growth because Dell EqualLogic PS6500E arrays spread writes across all 48 drives in each array, non-disruptively. “Performance is 20 times faster than the custom NFS storage we started out with,” says Wilson.

Flexible financing

Dell helps Keek stretch working capital. “Financing our entire infrastructure through Dell Financial Services makes all the difference,” says Lamont Wilcott, COO of Keek Inc.

Keek is an inspiration. Click on the image below to see their story. For more customer stories, see the case studies library. Do you have a Dell Storage story to tell? Leave a comment – we’d love to hear it.

About the Author: Scott Horst