NBC Universal
Sun helps NBC reach 50% greater online audience with 100% availability for Winter Olympic GamesNBC Universal is one of the world's leading media and entertainment companies, reaching a global audience. NBCOlympics.com is the site the company used to provide Web coverage, including streaming video, of the 2006 Winter Olympic Games from Torino, Italy. Business Issues
SolutionSun Fire V490 UltraSPARC IV+ systems and Sun Fire x64 servers powered NBCOlympics.com, running Solaris 10 Operating System with Sun N1 System Manager to ensure maximum uptime, fault recovery and load management. Sun Services provided installation, engineering expertise and site support. Sun data management products stored and managed all the scores, video and other Web components on Sun 5310 NAS and Sun 6130 Fibre Channel arrays, providing content to Akamai's video streaming and web delivery infrastructure.
Success at a GlanceAs NBC Universal planned coverage for the 2006 Winter Olympic Games in Torino, Italy, it saw an opportunity to take advantage of the Web's popularity, and enrich coverage like never before. The network's site, NBCOlympics.com, would need to reliably handle up to 40 million page views per day. To do so would require an infrastructure upgrade from the HP/Linux platform that had served the 2004 Summer Olympic Games in Athens. However, the timeframe was short and the deadline immutable. Add in a tight budget and limited human resources, and the challenge was daunting.
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For each of the past three Olympics, NBCOlympics.com has redefined online event coverage. Through compelling video, up-to-the-minute searchable schedules and listings, live results, blogs, athlete profiles, games and much more, we've taken fans closer to the athletes and games than ever before. We are thrilled to have the technology products, support and services from Sun Microsystems to help make this all possible.
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— Gary Zenkel, President, NBC Olympics
NBC Universal chose an upgrade proposal from Sun, supporting Akamai web content and video streaming services-but only if Sun could complete a proof of concept in 45 days, demonstrating that NBCOlympics.com's applications perform and interoperate well on the Sun platform. Sun Services worked with the site's host company, Internet Broadcasting Services (IBS), to deploy a solution and pass the proof of concept on time, by November 15, 2005. Sun rolled out the entire solution during the next two weeks, meeting the end of November deadline. To support high availability, Sun's strategy was to keep the 74-server infrastructure extremely simple. It included one model of a Sun x86 server and one model of a Sun UltraSPARC IV+-based server, displacing HP equipment still in place from the 2004 games. Sun N1 System Manager software made it possible to manage the site’s primary data center-and a disaster recovery data center-from a single location, by one system administrator, thereby reduced total operating costs by 70 percent. Read more about the value Sun N1 System Manager provided and the site’s disaster recovery strategy. Almost everything ran on Solaris 10 Operating System. Because Adobe Cold Fusion, the site’s content creation application, has no Solaris 10 OS version, it ran on Red Hat Linux on four V20zs. For storage, the site used two Sun StorageTek 6130 SAN arrays and one Sun StorageTek 5310C NAS appliance at both its primary and disaster recovery sites. The 6130s provided database storage, while the 5310C served as a video repository and web content repository, passing the content to Akamai's delivery infrastructure. The overall results: A simplified Sun architecture allowed NBCOlympics.com to deliver 100 percent availability, while keeping costs down. Meanwhile, more than two billion people worldwide watched the 2006 Torino Olympic Games on NBC and its affiliates. And, 50 percent more people than in the 2004 Summer Olympic Games turned to the Internet for Olympic updates. The Sun solution reliably fed Akamai's infrastructure cache, which in turn served up 375 million page views with zero downtime. Viewers in the United States enjoyed 115,000 hours of streaming video delivered over the Web (online video distribution was restricted to the U.S. due to a rights agreement), with most clips averaging between 30 seconds and two minutes in length. Viewers also received 3.8 million customized e-mail and text message alerts, getting desired event results fast. Learn more about NBCOlympics.com’s disaster recovery strategy and the value that Sun N1 System Manager provided. |
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