Digital Broadcaster Embraces OpenStack Innovation to Build Rapidly Scalable Infrastructure and Improve Services Time-to- Market

• Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Computing

• Telecommunications

• Discrete Manufacturing

• Infrastructure Inspection
• Cybersecurity

• Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
• System Integration

The company’s engineering teams build infrastructure and applications that allow the business to deliver market leading digital content to TVs, PCs, and mobile devices. This requires systems that rapidly scale, speed time-to-market, and protect valued intellectual property; all without exceeding target costs. Agile and immediate expansion of infrastructure is especially important for comprehensive sports offerings. “Demand spikes during important events can place a huge strain on our systems,” says the company’s Director of Cloud Solutions. “To respond to large-scale online requests, we often need immediate and sizable increases in application capacity.” Equally important to business success is enabling rapid development and deployment of new customer services. Continuous integration and deployment, now replacing waterfall programming methods, require elastic system architectures that allow for quick provisioning and deprovisioning of infrastructure based on developer needs. In addition to scalability and speed of development, new systems require strong protection of intellectual property to prevent cyber attacks. This means integration with existing robust security solutions. New infrastructure must also integrate with existing network and storage frameworks, and accommodate software development processes with minimal impact on efficiency.

With over 30 million subscribers in the Americas accessing 200 channels of video entertainment, this company is now a recognized leader in digital television. Fueling growth is the innovative streaming of premium content, exclusive concerts, and original series to PCs and mobile devices. And a recent merger has added wireless and broadband customers to an already competitive entertainment portfolio. To maintain leadership and combat new market entrants, engineering teams use rapid innovation to deliver a superior customer experience. The company deploys leading-edge technologies to meet challenging advertiser and subscriber needs including instant access to live and on-demand content – anywhere, anytime – even in periods of peak demand such as sporting events. In this demanding environment, the company requires massively scalable infrastructure that enables rapid and flexible application development. Important to meet this need is extensive use of open source solutions and innovation including those within the OpenStack community.

The company’s engineers attended OpenStack conferences and user groups, interacted with community members, and began to formulate strong ideas of how OpenStack technologies could drive a stateof-the-art Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) deployment. At community events, the infrastructure team was introduced to Mirantis engineers with extensive knowledge of OpenStack architectures. After engaging conversations on architectural options, the team could clearly see how the rapid release of new technologies such as containers and microservices could spur innovation. Of particular interest were developing integrations to existing legacy systems such as authentication, LDAP, and DNS, using OpenStack as a unified control plane with multiple hypervisors, and expediting the path to production. In the fall of 2015, the company was ready to move forward and confidently engaged Mirantis for OpenStack distribution, training, and deployment support of their OpenStack IaaS platform. With a successful proof-of-concept behind them, the team then deployed a pre-production cloud in their U.S. datacenter with the goal to meet all requirements for their intended production infrastructure and scale up to thousands of virtual machines.

• Fast development of OpenStack IaaS
• Rapid provisioning of VMs, from days to minutes
• Extensive learnings from OpenStack community

• Speed of provisioning has increased from days to minutes
• Expect to be in production with thousands of VMs by the end of 2016