SISTIC

Story Details

As the largest ticketing service and solution provider in Singapore, SISTIC sells tickets for about 90% of all events staged in Singapore through a ticket distribution network that extends beyond the island state to countries such as Malaysia and Indonesia.

In 2003, SISTIC built STiX, its in-house ticketing solution and the engine behind its ticketing operations. A Web-based platform, STiX was designed by seasoned domain experts and ticketing practitioners that made it a functionally rich tool for users. To ensure that STiX was robust and scalable, SISTIC selected Sun hardware, the Solaris Operating System, and an Oracle database.

In December 2007, SISTIC launched its third-generation Web portal. The new portal was designed for easier navigation and has expanded bandwidth to absorb peak loads. To support the new Web portal, SISTIC chose Sun Fire X4100 M2 and Sun Fire X4200 M2 servers to deploy a highly reliable data warehousing and business intelligence solution. Sun Fire X4100 M2 servers provide SISTIC with a fast, reliable, and energy-efficient one- to eight-way x64 database server solution, powered by one or two quad-core or dual-core AMD Opteron processors for CPU efficiency. This efficiency is crucial for SISTIC, especially when a popular event goes on sale and the volume of ticket sales soars. The Sun Fire X4100 M2 and Sun Fire X4200 M2 servers also help ensure cost efficiencies by delivering up to 56% lower cooling and power costs compared with other servers.

The high-performance Sun servers support the solution throughout all the cluster farms and are backed by Sun StorageTek 6140 arrays. The Sun StorageTek6140 provides faster performance than the previous SCSI storage. With the SAN array, it is easy to increase the storage capacity as it is scalable. Sun StorageTek Common Array Manager is being used to configure, manage and monitor the array. SISTIC’s Web portal and ticketing solution are securely supported to ensure a rapid, safe, and highly available ticketing experience for consumers, partners, and vendors 24x7.

To ensure maximum flexibility for the future, all servers run on the Solaris 10 Operating System. Seven high-capacity servers have been deployed, and more servers can be added if required — without any system downtime.

SISTIC’s newly upgraded system was first tested by ticket sales for a very popular event. Even when the number of concurrent hits on the system more than doubled previous record numbers, the ticketing solution performed effectively without any interruption in service. The system was further tested with simulated load tests and by other real ticketing events with even higher volumes. With loads exceeding the previous benchmark by more than five times, CPU resources barely reached 30% of capacity.

In addition to delivering high availability, the company has improved both the customer experience and the number of ticket transactions processed per hour. SISTIC has experienced a 64% reduction in booking transaction cycle times since STiX was deployed on the enhanced infrastructure.

Sun Fire architecture scalability enables SISTIC to meet future system and operational demands. The company plans to invest substantially in additional services for its STiX solution in order to integrate and sell tickets for a wide range of events such as theater, movies, sports, and other leisure attractions, both in Singapore and overseas. Looking ahead, SISTIC’s investment plans include new servers— in particular, the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5120 server, which will be used as new database server nodes to further enhance SISTIC’s back-office operations.