Keeping the tills pinging for this eCommerce platform

Learn how Severalnines and ClusterControl empowered VidaXL’s eCommerce platform to scale across servers and centralize their database management

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Industry eCommerce

Technologies MongoDB, MySQL

Products ClusterControl

Background

vidaXL caters to the product hunters, offering items for inside and outside the home at competitive prices. With a catalog of currently over 20,000 products to choose from and selling directly in 29 countries, it has a huge task of managing and updating the database of its consumers rely on to fulfill their orders. With 200,000 orders monthly, vidaXL is one of the largest international e-retailers.

Challenge

The eCommerce company is growing and it has an aim of expanding its product catalog to over 10,000,000 items within the next 12 months. This extremely large selection of goods creates a wealth of new data; images alone in the catalog create roughly 100 terabytes worth of data, and the products rows between one to two terabytes. The increase of data originally required vidaXL to hire more database administrators (DBAs), but it searched for a cost-effective solution.

Using several different tools, rather than a one-stop shop, was detrimental to our productivity. Severalnines is that “shop” and we haven’t looked back. It’s an awesome solution like no other.
Zeger Knops, Head of Business Technology for VidaXL

Solution

ClusterControl was deployed to manage the database systems. As scaling was an issue for vidaXL, particularly the horizontal scaling of its servers, ClusterControl as a single platform replaced the need for a combination of tools and the sometimes unreliable command-line
control. The ClusterControl deployment took around one week to implement, with no extra support required from Severalnines.

ClusterControl is easily integrated within a polyglot framework, managing different databases with the same efficiency. vidaXL is using several different databases, MongoDB and MySQL for product and customer listings, along with ElasticSearch, for its real-time search capabilities; ClusterControl was plugged in to automate the management and give control over the scaling of MongoDB and MySQL. The operations team also leveraged it for proactive reporting.

Outcome

Zeger Knops, Head of Business Technology, vidaXL said, “We’re looking to grow exponentially in the near future with the products we offer and maintain our position as the world’s largest eCommerce operator. This means we cannot suffer any online outages which lead to a loss of revenue. Scaling from thousands to millions of products is a giant leap
and that will require us to have a strong infrastructure foundation. Our back-end is reliant on different databases to tackle different tasks. Using several different tools, rather than a one-stop shop, was detrimental to our productivity. Severalnines is that “shop” and we haven’t looked back. It’s an awesome solution like no other.”

Vinay Joosery, Severalnines’ CEO, added, “As we head towards the busy end of the year for retailers with Cyber Monday just around the corner, a product catalog of VidaXL’s size requires strong database management skills and technologies. Keeping operations online and supplying people with their required orders is key. We trust that VidaXL will continue to reap the benefits of ClusterControl as it grows.”

Summary

One tool for polyglot infrastructure

ClusterControl is easily integrated with a polyglot framework, managing different databases with the same efficiency.

ClusterControl for horizontal scaling

Scaling was an issue for VidaXL, particularly the horizontal scaling of its servers. ClusterControl – a single platform – replaced the need for a combination of tools.