NBCOlympics.com

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NBCOlympics.com serves as the online home of the Olympic Games, including the recent 2008 Summer Games in Beijing, China, and the upcoming 2010 Winter Games in Vancouver, British Columbia. A destination for millions of fans of the Olympics, the site provides streaming real-time video coverage of Olympic events, television listings, athlete biographies, and breaking news stories.

In preparing to set up the site for the 2008 Summer Games, NBC Sports was faced with major technology requirements. For instance, the site had to support 17 full days of live event coverage, including 2,000 hours of streaming video. Additionally, all 34 Olympic sports needed their own homepages on the site. “The memory requirements are massive for this kind of project,” says Dan Hogan, vice president of technology for NBC Sports and Olympics. “The site gets millions of visits per day and big traffic spikes, so we wanted to make sure that we had enough capacity.”

Availability is also critical to the site’s success. “For the Summer Olympics, we only have 17 days every two years to do this properly — there is no margin for error. We have to guarantee site uptime and stability. And on August 8, when the games started at 8 p.m., we had to be ready to go live with confidence.”

NBCOlympics.com was also interested in a compact, environmentally friendly hosting solution. “We don’t have unlimited space and power for hosting the site, so we wanted to find a solution that fit within our datacenters in California and New Jersey,” adds Hogan. “We also strive to be responsible in the way that we’re using power. We are always looking at solutions that reduce power, packaging, and transportation.”

When it came time to choose a vendor to help meet its needs, NBCOlympics.com quickly decided on Sun Microsystems, which had provided software and hardware for the site during the 2006 Winter Olympics in Torino, Italy. “We were really looking for someone with some expertise in doing these types of events, and obviously we had worked successfully with Sun in Torino,” remarks Perkins Miller, senior vice president of digital media for NBC Sports and Olympics.

Beginning in January 2008, Sun helped NBCOlympics.com deploy a combination of 160 Sun Fire X4150 and Sun Fire X4450 servers in its two datacenters, to provide the hosting infrastructure for the site. For the deployment, Sun used Altiris Deployment Solution software, part of the Symantec product family. An automated deployment and configuration solution, Altiris was used by the Sun team to stage the entire NBCOlympics.com environment, which was based on Windows Server 2003. These servers formed the base infrastructure that helped NBCOlympics.com stream millions of hours of video using Microsoft Silverlight.

NBCOlympics.com chose Sun Fire servers for their flexibility and capacity. “The Sun Fire X4150 server is very versatile, and offered us excellent support for our Web servers and application servers,” states Hogan. The Sun Fire X4450 server gave NBCOlympics.com the power it needed to host such a large infrastructure. “It gave us a lot of computing horsepower, which we needed for our databases,” he says. “And it’s a very flexible product that we could customize without actually making any physical adjustments during the games.”

The Sun Fire X4150 servers run on the Intel® Xeon® processor 5400 series, while the Sun Fire X4450 servers run on the Intel® Xeon® processor 7400 series. These Intel quad-core processors helped NBCOlympics.com achieve better performance and energy efficiency within the same space and power envelope.

Also, both server products are also compact. “They’re both very space- and power-efficient,” Hogan remarks. “If we had not been able to use the Sun Fire X4150 server, for example, we literally would not have been able to find the space and power to host the site from our datacenters.”

NBCOlympics.com also benefited from the speed of the Altiris Deployment Solution. “That software made everything go very fast,” Hogan says. “A large portion of the infrastructure in California, for example, was installed and configured over the course of one weekend. That’s record time for us.”

With the solution in place, NBCOlympics.com was able to support 50 million unique site visitors, 1.3 billion page views, 72 million video streams, and 10 million total hours of video. Hogan is quick to point out that the support and services provided by Sun were essential in making this happen successfully. “We knew that Sun had the expertise to manage this equipment, which is almost as important as the equipment itself,” Hogan says. “We also knew we could rely on Sun’s support teams to help us handle the stability and management of a site of this magnitude. What we get from Sun in terms of support is something I’ve never seen from another vendor.”