"We have a staff that does nothing but manage our image archive," he explains. "One of the big concerns in 2010 was the growth we were seeing in our image archive. We were going to have to grow our staff relative to the growth of our image archive, and that wasn't very attractive."

Day says Cleversafe emerged as the best fit for Shutterfly, mostly based on the company's willingness to work with Shutterfly to tailor its solution to Shutterfly's needs. The two companies started going through a series of progressive proofs of concept, including load and performance tests in Shutterfly's lab. After Shutterfly was comfortable with the operational and performance characteristics, it placed a parallel storage infrastructure in production, directing a copy of all Shutterfly's traffic to it.

"Every image coming in the door was written to our legacy infrastructure and the Cleversafe infrastructure," Day says. "We ran it for six months, including holidays."

The holidays are the peak season for Shutterfly, when many of its customers create photo books.

Shutterfly brought Cleversafe's storage solution into full production for its image archive in 2011 and has been using it as the primary image repository ever since.