August 9, 2012

ideel is one of the fastest growing retailers in the United States with more than 5 million members and 3,000 brand partners. Every morning at 11:00 a.m. ET, members flood the site to shop the latest trends. The event-based shopping experience generates similar results to the release of hot concert tickets, with members flocking to make purchases and pushing loads on the application in excess of 3,000 requests per second, with more than 700 “add to carts” per second.

To ensure that the site is highly responsive, ideel pushes everything into memory across several memcached servers. If however the cache in one or more memcached servers is inadvertently dumped, the user experience becomes degraded, translating into lost revenue and negative sentiment in the market. Riak provides a highly reliable, persistent cache store to safeguard against just such an event.

According to David Mitchell, ideel’s director of technical operators, “Riak is one of those things that just works and doesn’t need our attention on a day-to-day basis — saving both time and money. As for service and support, I can’t say I’ve seen anything quite like the amazing response time we’ve witnessed from Riak. The technology is rock-solid, enabling us to keep up with member demand and maintain a high level of satisfaction. Riak and Riak have exceeded our expectations.”

Read the full story here.

Thanks for reading!