CANAL+

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CANAL+ delivers premium paid television and specialty channels to a rapidly expanding subscriber base. It reported revenues of 3.6 billion EUR in 2006, and grew its profits to 251 million EUR.

Its primary application was developed internally and manages programming for its 40 channels, among other functions. Until 2005, this application was distributed to about a dozen locations. It was made up of multiple business modules linked to an Oracle database with the entire system running on 15 x86 Microsoft Windows servers hosted with an outside service provider.

Several strategic reasons drove CANAL+ to reconsider its architecture. The application did not cover the operations of all 15 of its thematic paid television channels. However, integrating them into one system would more than double the number of daily users.

“We wanted to bolster our production environment to support the load, while at the same time preserving scalability,” explains Christophe Remy-Neris, an IT director at CANAL+. “If we chose to multiply the number of host servers we risked a considerable increase in our operating costs, given that each critical server would be subjected to a costly service contract and then replicated for security measures. On the IT front, we wanted to optimize resource management and improve service levels. We also wanted to be able to integrate old and new applications. Finally, we needed to improve reliability in order to avoid any downtime related to having to perform periodic preventative reboots.”

Faced with the need to upgrade, CANAL+ considered several alternatives, and chose to migrate to Sun Fire servers running the Solaris 10 Operating System from the 15 Microsoft Windows servers running Oracle database. The Sun solution required no major code modifications. In addition, advanced functionality such as Solaris 10 Containers enabled Remy-Neris and his team to consolidate more applications on each server.

“Sun Containers differentiated Sun in the virtualization space. We would be able to deploy an unlimited number of virtual servers on the four physical servers Sun proposed,” says Remy-Neris. “This was particularly useful for nightly batch jobs, a very resource-intensive operation. This had been impossible with Windows.”

The Sun team implemented the solution on two Sun Fire E2900 servers supported by a Sun StorageTek 6130 disk storage array, as well as one Sun Fire V890 server and a Sun Fire V490 server for development, validation, and training. For system support, Canal+ chose a SunSpectrum Gold Service Plan for its fully-integrated 24x7 hardware and OS support and its SunVIP interoperability assistance feature.

The CANAL+ IT team was impressed with the stability of the Solaris Operating System and its functionality. “We have the ability to modify links between Solaris Containers and processors, and the ability to attribute one or several processors to a single Container,” says Remy-Neris. “The DTrace framework within Solaris 10 has allowed us to identify the causes of performance problems, something we had never been able to perform successfully with the Windows platform.”

A year later, CANAL+ has achieved its objectives. “The move to Solaris was completely transparent for our users,” says Remy-Neris. We didn’t suffer any downtime despite the integration of fifteen new channels and seventy percent more users.”

“Consolidation from fifteen to four physical servers has reduced our costs, and we are now in a position to add new channels and deploy new services without overburdening ourselves with hosting costs.”