|
MyMovies.net
was founded in March 1999 and is dedicated to exploiting new and
emergent technologies in order to provide the widest possible consumer
audience to the UK film industry.
The company is a pioneer in the supply of content for delivery across a
variety of media platforms. MyMovies creates, produces and syndicates a
wealth of movie-related material to everybody who enjoys a good film,
whether at the cinema or on DVD. This unique content includes Movie
News (news and gossip from Hollywood and beyond), Movie Reviews (both
text and audiovisual) and the latest Celebrity interviews and ‘behind
the scenes’ features (often exclusive to MyMovies.Net).
This content is available through the MyMovies.Net portal, the number
one on-line movie destination in the UK, with a database of over
320,000 subscribers. It is also served to over 500,000 unique users
generating over 5million page impressions a month and to key industry
partners operating across the breadth of new media platforms (including
narrowband, broadband, digital TV and 3G). A requested weekly
newsletter to over 100,000 subscribers is also produced.
MyMovies.Net is also preparing for the global rollout of broadband is
fully equipped to capitalize upon the multi-billion pound investment in
the broadband infrastructure. The launch of the companies' Video on
Demand library is in the pipeline.
"Rock
solid, 100% fault tolerant and cost effective solution that is perfect
for the cost conscious IT professional, who does not want to spend the
extra £10k on functionality they will never use, as with most
other vendors. These appliances do exactly what what it says on the
tin. I'm over the moon!"
Paul Richards, Director of Operations
MyMovies.net
was experiencing a rapidly growing customer base, and this in turn was
proving a strain for the current web application and movie streaming
infrastructure.
Paul Richards (Director of Operations) drew up a requirements list for current and future exponential growth.
-
Web Site Reliability & Scalability (low latency and 5 nines uptime)
-
Media Streaming Scalability & Performance ( >1 GBps potential requirement)
-
24*7 - 4 hour On Site Hardware maintenance
-
24*7 Technical Support
Several of the major load balancing vendors were approached including F5, CISCO & Zeus
They all recommended their top end products to handle the load (at wildly varying costs).
Paul
realized that although some of the vendors layer 7 features such as
compression were interesting they were not as scalable as load
balancing the layer 7 features within the farm (each of his servers
already handled compression & cookies for persistence).
Paul was just about to purchase 2 * F5 BIG-IP 6400 units when he came across ClusterScale.
ClusterScale
recommended that Paul change his infrastructure design so that only the
incoming traffic was handled by the load balancer in a one armed
(Direct Server Return) mode. Using this method even the smaller Pegasys
model could easily handle the >1GBps throughput requirement. This
also had the advantage of not requiring major changes to his current
architecture.
Unlike
other vendors, ClusterScale use commodity Dell hardware enabling global
24*7 hardware support. They were also happy for Paul to add DRAC cards
to the specification on top of the built in IPMI management
functionality.
Technical
Support direct from the UK head office in Portsmouth was second to none
as he had already experienced delays in getting 3rd level support from
the Californian HQ of other vendors.
“
It only took 10 minutes to setup the Nemasys units in our development
environment, but we decided to get a ClusterScale engineer to come in
and consult on the change over to our production network for added
peace of mind.”
Since the units have been installed Paul has had no concerns about the rapid growth of MyMovies.Net.
ClusterScale at a glance:
ClusterScale are a UK based company specializing in both Load Balancing & Data Base Clustering appliances.
ClusterScale
enables you to cost effectively and rapidly increase the availability
& scalability of your core business applications and systems.
Enabling you to make sound strategic investments in your
infrastructure, with guaranteed RoI.
ClusterScale
can help you design your infrastructure to be truly scalable by
providing solid appliance style solutions that you can then build and
expand on. ClusterScale are committed to open source platforms that
avoid locking customers into proprietary systems. |
