How Dreamstime stores and manages 64 million stock images with IBM Cloud Object Storage

Today’s digital media companies are experiencing an explosion of content, resulting in massive amounts of data that must be stored and secured. For media companies working with high-resolution images, content repositories can consist of millions of photos and visuals, with hundreds of terabytes or even petabytes of data.
Stock photo company Dreamstime provides millions of high-quality images to clients in the creative market, from independent customers in the private sector to Fortune 500 companies. The Dreamstime website has 18 million registered members and receives content from more than 300,000 contributing photographers from around the world.
Petabytes of stock images
Dreamstime manages 64 million photos, illustrations, clipart images and vectors for a total of 1.5 petabytes of data. This repository is growing at a rapid clip, with photographers uploading an average of 1 million new images to the Dreamstime website every week.
All these images must be securely stored and backed up, while being available to creative clients for immediate download via the Dreamstime website or our homegrown mobile app.
The need for an affordable storage solution
To manage our content repository, we relied on replicated RAID 6 storage. However, as the data repository grew in size, we needed a more efficient and cost-effective technology to store and manage petabytes of data while making data available to our vast customer base.
Dreamstime needed a storage infrastructure that was readily available, protected against data loss and could be easily integrated with its mobile application, which manages the presentation and ordering of stock images and videos.
We also needed a storage solution that could handle and protect against surges in use, especially around peak periods such as holidays, which see a 100 percent increase in downloads.
We worked with IBM to analyze our storage and traffic requirements, ultimately selecting the IBM Cloud Object Storage regional Flex option as the best fit. The solution provides flexible, secure storage and backup while protecting against possible surges in read costs.
We were able to integrate the Dreamstime customer-facing web and mobile application with the new IBM Cloud Object Storage solution, using a sample code provided by IBM. We tested and validated that everything worked seamlessly with the IBM Cloud Object Storage free trial instance before going live.
A more efficient content repository storage solution
With IBM Cloud Object Storage, Dreamstime now has virtually limitless scalability to keep pace with our growing library of stock images. The company’s new, highly elastic solution can meet heavy customer demand, even in peak usage. Additionally, we no longer need to monitor servers for maintenance issues, eliminating a hassle for the Dreamstime IT team.
Since migrating to IBM Cloud Object Storage, Dreamstime has achieved a 40 percent decrease in overall storage and backup costs. IBM Cloud Object Storage uses SecureSlice technology, which combines encryption, erasure coding and geo-dispersal of data for greater security, flexibility and availability using only one copy of the data.  As a result, this innovative technology backs up Dreamstime’s data without duplicating it, yet still offers a high level of resilience.
The bottomline is we no longer need double or triple the storage. Since the Cloud Object Storage technology is so reliable, our Dreamstime content repository now has a dual purpose: it is an active storage repository while providing geo-dispersed disaster recovery and backup storage. This efficient solution provides significant time and cost savings for our company.
Learn more about how companies can benefit from IBM Cloud Object Storage.
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