RedBubble: Creativity online

Melbourne, Australia: In early 2007, the creative, technology and business skills of three friends gave birth to RedBubble, an on-line creative community and art gallery. Designed specifically to help photographers, artists and graphic designers display and sell their work on-line, RedBubble is emerging as a driving force in the Australian creative scene; and delivering the technology foundation for the company’s success is a broad-based Apple strategy.

Best possible server technology

Within barely three months of being launched RedBubble had gained such a level of popularity that according to Hitwise Australia, it ranked among the top five Australian arts sites by visits and page views. “It is definitely striking a chord with artists,” RedBubble Managing Director, Peter Styles says. “And their positive word of mouth is really driving our growth.”

As the site’s growth in membership continues, though, the ability of its underlying infrastructure to cope with a high-demand online business becomes ever more critical. Delivering that ability are four Apple Xserves running an OS X server and XTB in an Apple Xserve RAID.

“Even though we maintain a 100 per cent Apple desktop environment, we looked at a range of server platforms before deciding on the Apple Xserve,” Styles says. “Quite simply, we wanted nothing less than the best possible server technology hosting our Web-based community.”

“With thousands of members uploading lots of artwork as 5 to 10Mb files, you can imagine how quickly we will need to scale our application and hardware as we grow.”

Having opted for four Apple Xserves and a RAID solution, RedBubble can easily scale up to 105TB of data storage in a single rack-optimised storage enclosure. “If all goes to plan,” Styles continues, “RedBubble will soon be one of the biggest Web sites hosted on Apple hardware, outside Apple itself.”