"It's fundamentally a software solution, allowing us to deploy on very, very cost-effective hardware," Day says. "That changes the whole picture from a total cost of ownership perspective for us. We have more flexibility dealing with hardware vendors and can guarantee that we're getting the best possible price on the drives and the infrastructure that supports them."

Administering the storage pool has also been greatly simplified, Day says.

"We can basically just add another brick of storage and it automatically gets added to whichever pool we designate it for," he says. "Previously, we had to do some fairly interesting administrative gymnastics whenever we added additional storage."

Also, now, when a drive fails or goes offline, Shutterfly's storage infrastructure is able to mark it as unavailable and route data around it while recovering data on that drive transparently. Instead of an "all hands on deck" situation when a drive or a shelf fails, Day says his team can now simply note the failure and replace the affected infrastructure on a scheduled maintenance schedule.