NBC Universal

Sun N1 System Manager helps NBC deliver Olympic Games online coverage with 100% availability and 70% lower TCO

NBC Universal is one of the world's leading media and entertainment companies, serving 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.

Customer Challenges

Deploy a Winter Olympic Games Web site to serve heavy global traffic demands in under six weeks
Ensure maximum uptime, business continuity and disaster protection, maintaining NBC's reputation for excellence
Optimize server and storage performance and load balancing to ensure the smoothest user experience

Solution

Sun 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 5310C NAS and Sun 6130 Fibre Channel arrays, providing content to Akamai's video streaming and web delivery infrastructure.

Business Results

375 million page views served by Akamai without downtime, with content provided by Sun infrastructure
115,000 hours of streaming video viewed via Akamai infrastructure
Successful delivery of 3.8 million customized e-mail and text message alerts
50% more traffic than previous Olympic Games Web site
Tight six-week site development schedule met
70% savings in total operating costs

Products and Services

Story Details

Every four years, for 16 days in February, the Winter Olympic Games dominate world media coverage. In 2006, more than two billion people from around the world tuned in to see the event through the eyes of NBC Universal’s (NBCU’s) television coverage.

The television version is supplemented and enhanced by NBCU's online coverage at NBCOlympics.com. In 2006, 50 percent more people visited this site than had done so just two years before, during the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens.

" 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. "

— Gary Zenkel, President, NBC Olympics

The results confirm the growing popularity of turning to the Web to explore events. Because NBCU’s reputation is just as much on the line in its Web coverage as it is in its broadcasting, downtime at NBCOlympics.com was not an option.

That’s why, when the games were over, NBC expressed appreciation for its Sun platform. The platform had just helped an Akamai web delivery and streaming video solution deliver 375 million page views, 115,000 hours of video and 3.8 million customized e-mail and text message alerts with 100 percent availability.

Sun N1 System Manager software played a key role in supporting that success and delivering high availability. A Sun team member used the software to provision both NBCOlympics.com data centers–the primary center at Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey and another at a disaster recovery (DR) site in Los Angeles.

Sun N1 System Manager also allowed one system administrator to manage both data centers from a single location, reducing total operating costs by 70 percent.

Each data center included 22 Sun Fire servers running Solaris 10 Operating System, eight Sun Fire V20z servers running Red Hat Linux and four Sun Fire V20z servers as bare-metal spares.

For storage, each site had two Sun StorageTek 6130 SAN arrays and one Sun StorageTek 5310C NAS appliance. The 6130s provided database storage, while the 5310C served as a video repository and web content repository.

Sun N1 System Manager enabled both sites to be provisioned in a week, meeting a tight deadline. In addition, if a server failed, the Sun N1 software could immediately be used to provision one of the spare servers, bringing a predefined server image online in less than 20 minutes.

Once live, data was mirrored between the two sites every 30 minutes to ensure that the DR site would be able to take over if needed. Sun, IBS and Akamai participated in a test of the failover capability, determining that the Englewood Cliffs site could fail over to the Los Angeles site in less than 30 minutes. During the Olympics, the primary center never failed, so the failover capability was never used.

The Sun platform had delivered on target, with Sun N1 System Manager and Solaris 10 OS helping to ensure maximum uptime, fault recovery and load management. Based on the success of the Sun solution at NBCOlympics.com, NBCU and Sun are exploring additional future projects together.

Read the full story of the Sun platform's success at NBCOlympics.com and fast deployment.