MercadoLibre powered by SolidFire’s all-flash scale-out storage platform

MercadoLibre, Latin America’s leading e-commerce technology company, has selected SolidFire to power its OpenStack-based private cloud and serve its online community of over 550 million buyers and sellers.

MercadoLibre (“free market” in Spanish) is the #1 e-commerce website in Latin America offering a wide range of services to buyers and sellers throughout the region, including marketplace, payments, advertising and e-building solutions. Established in Argentina in August 1999, the online marketplace rapidly expanded and now operates in 13 countries across Latin America, including Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Mexico, Ecuador, Peru, Panama, Portugal, Uruguay and Venezuela.

“Deploying SolidFire’s all-flash scale-out storage platform was a key part of MercadoLibre’s technology strategy that enables us to continuously innovate and lead e-commerce in Latin America,” said MercadoLibre’s CTO Daniel Rabinovich. “SolidFire’s scalability and Quality of Service (QoS) allows us to build key services and technological solutions that enhance our commerce platforms and deploy them in real-time to our customers with guaranteed performance and no disruption - critical elements for our business and its financial health.”

MercadoLibre faced several challenges with its previous scale-up storage infrastructure which impaired its ability to scale without disruption and offer required levels of capacity and performance. The problem was most acute with its MySQL and MongoDB databases, which suffered from slow, unpredictable performance.

MercadoLibre’s IT department also had trouble balancing workloads within its storage environment and were unable to provide consistent and balanced latency for every IO within its multi-tenant infrastructure.

SolidFire’s all-flash scale-out platform solved MercadoLibre’s storage challenges by delivering non-disruptive linear scalability of both capacity and performance. Its unique guaranteed Quality of Service (QoS) technology enabled MercadoLibre to significantly reduce latency within MySQL and MongoDB databases from 50 to 2 milliseconds. The SolidFire platform integrated seamlessly with MercadoLibre’s existing OpenStack private cloud, and decreased its data footprint by 6.5 times, along with significant space and power savings.

“We were looking for a single solution that could scale out without having to purchase a new system every time capacity or performance demands dictated. With SolidFire we can now add nodes on the fly, growing capacity and performance without downtime,” said Mariano Guelar, MercadoLibre storage specialist. “With SolidFire, we can start with a small storage infrastructure and scale both performance and capacity, allowing us to consolidate a broad number applications within a single system.”

"MercadoLibre excels at providing innovative and useful ways for consumers to shop in its online marketplace - and the challenges its IT team faced were hampering that innovative spirit," said Dave Wright, CEO of SolidFire. "Now with SolidFire’s scale-out solution in place, it's great to see buyers and sellers flocking to MercadoLibre’s platform, while the company gains the agility and scalability they need to meet the demands of such a large and rapidly-growing community."