Harris Corporation

Broadcasters tune in to Sun Fire X4600 servers as the ideal platform for traffic management software

Optimal Solutions, Inc. (OSi), a brand of Harris Corporation, helps broadcasters manage their business more efficiently through industry-leading traffic, sales, yield and accounting software. The Broadcast Communications Division of Harris markets OSi software.

Customer Challenges

Provide customers with a turnkey solution for traffic management
Ensure scalability to accommodate business growth
Support hosted software model with high availability

Solution

Sun's AMD servers have become the platform of choice for Harris’s traffic management software for a number of leading broadcasters.

Business Results

4-to-1 server consolidation
75% rack space reduction (4U compared to 16U)
69% reduction in cost of platform

Products and Services

Sun Fire X4600 Server

Story Details

Traffic software is a key tool for TV and radio stations: It manages the placement of advertising time within the broadcast schedule. OSi-Traffic, a product of Harris Corporation, is one of the top solutions for broadcast traffic management. Harris sells the OSi software to customers as a turnkey package, including Microsoft SQL Server.

Harris’s typical platform for SQL Server used to be two IBM servers running Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition. When Harris learned about the Sun Fire X4600 server, it saw an opportunity to consolidate onto a single server, reducing the complexity of the platform and saving costs. The big question was performance.

" The Sun Fire X4600 server allows us to offer our software solution to clients on a very tight budget, without sacrificing performance. It’s our recommended platform for large to enterprise-level clients. "

— Jeff Richardson, Manager of Information Technology, Broadcast Division, Harris Corporation

Harris asked for an evaluation unit to do performance testing. Based on the testing, the company determined that the Sun Fire X4600 server offers more than twice the performance of the IBM servers. Best of all, even a fully loaded Sun Fire X4600 server—with eight dual-core AMD Opteron processors—can still run Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition. (Servers with more than eight processors must be licensed for Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Datacenter Edition, a more expensive and complex operating system.) The scalability of the Sun Fire X4600 server is another benefit, since customers can start with the number of processors they need and add more without changing the architecture.

The company has installed the Sun Fire X4600 server at a number of customer sites, including Sinclair Broadcast Group in Maryland. Sinclair has replaced four IBM xSeries 455 servers with a single Sun Fire X4600 server, which is handling more than 650 users. Other recent installations include Cox Television and Pappus Telecasting.

The Sun Fire X4600 server only takes up 4U of rack space compared to 16U for the IBM servers, a 4-to-1 consolidation. Switching to the Sun Fire X4600 server reduces the platform cost by 69% and increases reliability: The IBM solution fails if any one of the four servers fails.

Because the traffic operation is so critical to the financial well-being of a broadcast operation, it’s important that the servers stay up and running. Harris includes a SunSpectrum contract with every Sun Fire X4600 server to ensure the high availability that customers need.

Customers vary in their internal IT expertise, but when they need help, Harris recommends Sun Professional Services. At an OSi-Traffic installation for Cox Communications, the Sun engineer installed a Sun Fire X4600 server and, at the customers’ request, configured EMC memory to work with it.

The Sun Fire X4600 server has dramatically reduced both the cost and the complexity of the platform for the typical installation of the Harris OSi-Traffic software. Harris is now beginning to offer hosted OSi software, and the Sun Fire X4600 server is the platform of choice for that business model as well. In the past, customers used to automatically think IBM, HP, or Dell for Windows servers, but no more. Customers like Harris realize that, when it comes to a high-performance, reliable, scalable Windows platform, Sun is dialed in.