Gracenote

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Popular digital devices enable consumers to hold vast collections of recordings in the palm of their hands. But these devices would be of little use without the ability to search and instantly find the recordings that listeners want to hear and to display titles, composers, performers, and other relevant information. The basic technology that makes digital music searchable — and provides value-added services such as playlists of other songs the listener may like — is the stock-in-trade of Gracenote, which is based in Emeryville, California.

In selecting the hardware to run its online service, Gracenote considers products that meet its stringent criteria. “We need fast performance, and when you have hardware in multiple co-location facilities, some of which are remote from your offices, you need to put in equipment that is highly reliable,” says Matthew Leeds, vice president of operations for Gracenote.

To get the performance and reliability it needs, Gracenote has chosen Sun x64 AMD Opteron processor-based servers. It currently uses Sun Fire X2200 M2 servers. “Our Sun x64 systems with AMD Opteron processors are extremely reliable, with the highest price/performance characteristics we could find in x64 servers,” says Leeds.

Gracenote evaluated the Sun x64 platform through Sun’s Try and Buy Program, in which organizations receive a trial product and test it free of charge for 60 days with full technical support. “The Try and Buy Program allows us to control our capital expenditures by first being sure that a new platform we’re going to invest in is qualified for our software. We would never buy a new platform without testing it first,” says Leeds.

Should there be a problem with a server, Gracenote knows that a technician will be on site within four hours and will have the necessary parts (as is specified in its SunSpectrum Gold contract). “It gives us comfort to know that we will be well cared for since we have co-location facilities that are more than a truck roll away from us,” says Leeds.

The third part of Gracenote’s Sun solution is the Solaris 10 Operating System. Gracenote handles 17 billion queries per month. All of its applications are heavily multithreaded, which the highly efficient threading model in Solaris OS handles with ease. The company’s Sun servers have always run the Solaris operating system, and to take advantage of this powerful threading capability, Gracenote migrated its non-Sun servers to Solaris as well. “With Linux, if you have too many concurrent threads, it eventually just starts to slow down—there’s a knee in the curve like a hockey stick,” says Leeds. “With Solaris 10 OS, there’s no knee in the curve.”

To replace several of its existing rack-mounted servers and avoid purchasing external storage, Gracenote has deployed a Sun Fire X4500 data server, which combines server functionality with ultra-dense storage. It saves space as well as capital costs. And with the Solaris ZFS file system, it’s quick and easy to lay out the array groups for storage.

Gracenote consolidated the workloads of 33 Dell servers onto 9 Sun Fire X2200 servers. “Not only does the Sun Fire X2200 save money in terms of purchasing power, it also saves well over 50% of the space that earlier rack-mount servers use and more than 50% of operating costs in terms of power and cooling,” says Leeds.

Gracenote scales its infrastructure to handle peak, rather than average, traffic. Its two biggest days are “Christmas and New Year’s Day, when people lookup a lot of music with their new MP3 players and CDs,” says Leeds. “We maintain three co-location facilities and can sustain the loss of one and still serve our customers. This means we have at least 150% of predicted peak capacity online at all times. Thanks to Sun’s scalable, reliable servers, we can keep that capacity going all the time.”