RTL France

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Despite the number of mass media available, one of the first — radio — continues to thrive in many parts of the world. Thanks to the widespread adoption of broadband Internet, which offers high-quality audio streaming, RTL France is seeing online listening figures grow for stations such as RTL, RTL 2, and Fun Radio. RTL France, which is part of the RTL Group, determined that it needed to completely rebuild its Windows-based Web portal and ASP.NET-based applications to support a larger audience with new services. The objective was to increase reliability and scalability while building an infrastructure that was easier to manage and more cost-effective and energy-efficient.

Specific upgrade tasks included replacing all network hardware, acquiring space at a hosting center, configuring transit and peering connections, setting up storage area network connections, and consolidating separate databases into a centrally managed one. “We started from scratch. We didn’t have any Java applications or application servers,” says Sébastien Thomas, network and system manager at RTL France.

For its application server, RTL France was interested only in open-source solutions that would be highly reliable in a production environment. Mr. Thomas says, “We evaluated Apache Tomcat, and we looked at some other technologies, like Ruby, for small applications. However, GlassFish proved to be a reliable and easy-to-manage solution.” GlassFish is based on the technology of Sun Java Platform Enterprise Edition 5 Application Server and its productized counterpart, the GlassFish Enterprise Server, which offers a comprehensive support offering for GlassFish.

A major advantage of Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server is its enhanced clustering capabilities, which are available in recent versions. The clustering technology will ensure high availability and scalability for deployment architectures through in-memory session-state replication. Additionally, the company will be able to create and manage clusters from a single administration console and manage a cluster as a single entity. Sébastien Thomas says, “Because applications are deployed only once on the server, it is much easier to administer several machines.”

An important early step in solution deployment was to virtualize RTL France’s Windows servers. To accomplish this, the company chose VMware ESX software running on Sun Fire X4600 servers. “We didn’t need to evaluate other vendors’ hardware,” Sébastien Thomas adds. “We’ve known Sun hardware for a long time and trust it. Moreover, our goal was to stick to only one hardware provider. Sun has everything we need, whether we’re running Solaris OS applications, Linux applications, or Windows applications on VMware.”

Additional hardware in the new infrastructure includes a Sun Fire T1000 server to test applications prior to deployment and two Sun Fire T2000 servers to run the applications in the production environment. The servers are powered by UltraSPARC T1 processors with CoolThreads technology and run the Solaris 10 Operating System. Three other T1000 servers are used to share static files. Sun Fire X4100 and X4100 M2 servers with AMD Opteron processors are used for batch and other back-end processing, including generating full-text indexes, content aggregation, and log parsing. Mr. Thomas says, “The computing power of the X4100 is just amazing for this kind of work.” An Oracle 11g database completes the platform. Sun StorageTek QFS software is used for sharing static files — such as cascading style sheets, JavaScript, pictures, and movie and audio files — across hosts. The solution is backed by SunSpectrum Platinum Support.

RTL France is pleased with the new solution’s performance. “The Sun servers were chosen based on their reliable, cost-effective, leading-edge technology,” says Mr. Thomas. “Having both UltraSPARC and X64 CPUs enables us to choose the right technology for the goal we want to achieve. We’ve found that the T1 processor is especially useful for dealing with lots of simultaneous requests, making it ideal for Web-site processing. AMD CPUs speed up our background processing.”

The company is also impressed with the Solaris 10 Operating System. Sébastien Thomas adds, “The Solaris OS has proven to be one of the best for system administrators, and the Solaris 10 OS takes it to the top. Tools like DTrace, ZFS, QFS, Zones, and comprehensive commands all help to ease administration tasks.”

Because RTL couldn’t directly migrate its ASP.NET applications to the new platform, the company is building completely new applications in Java. Sébastien Thomas says, “There haven’t been any problems integrating Java. Various modules have been brought over from Windows to Java for the launch, and the rest of the modules will be added when needed.”

Next, as part of a new blog project, RTL France is testing and will soon be upgrading to the latest version of Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server and taking advantage of account management and single sign-on features in Sun OpenSSO Enterprise. This will enable users to access the company’s services through Google, OpenID, or Facebook accounts. Mr. Thomas says, “Using SNMP Monitoring, Performance Advisor, and Performance Monitor in conjunction with a load tester, we’ll be able to fine-tune GlassFish Enterprise Server to suite our needs and ensure that application loads are handled efficiently. No other application server makes these tasks so easy or gives us such a high level of confidence.” In summarizing the value of the Sun solution, Mr. Thomas concludes, “With Sun, we get stability, confidence, and savings in power, costs, and time.”