Rivals.com Takes Tailgating Online with Compellent's Innovative SAN
To take college sports enthusiasts beyond static message boards to the next level of user generated content, Rivals.com needed a storage solution that could stand up to non-stop online tailgating. When planning for the launch of Tailgate TV, a site that allows users to upload and share videos of their tailgate parties, the IT department at Rivals.com became intense technology enthusiasts, selecting Compellent's storage area network (SAN) to support their fun and market leading venture.
Rivals.com has long been the online leader for in-depth information, analysis and "scoop" in college sports and recruiting. It’s where more than 170,000 active subscribers go for their sports fix. Traffic to Rivals.com web site doubles every year, and currently their site serves over 20 million unique page views a day. To stay in this leadership position, Rivals.com expanded user interaction with the introduction of Tailgate TV.
Explosive Rivals.com subscriber growth alone had demand for capacity doubling every year. And Tailgate TV added fuel to the capacity fire, forcing Rivals to replace their existing network attached storage solution with a cost effective easy to use, easy to expand solution. "Compellent provides us with affordable, incredibly easy to manage storage solution," commented Greg Gough, chief technology officer for Rivals.com.
Introduced to Compellent through their data center services provider, Rivals.com was quickly sold on Compellent’s unprecedented manageability, quick capacity expansion and planning and single step ILM.
Compellent’s Intuitive Interface Delivers Unprecedented Ease of Use
With storage systems that are difficult to scale or manage, keeping pace with rapid capacity growth can be an IT nightmare. Fortunately for Rivals, expanding storage capacity takes only a few minutes with Storage Center’s intuitive interface rather than the two hours it used to take with their previous storage solution. Better yet, all of this can be easily accomplished by any member of Rivals.com IT staff.
"Ease of use was a key purchase criteria for us, and with Compellent, my administrators spend less time provisioning storage, expanding and assigning volumes, and manually tracking volume utilization," explains Gough. "Because Compellent has cut our overall storage management time in half, we’ve been able to manage our increasing demand for capacity without adding additional administrators."
Quick Capacity Expansion with Thin Provisioning
Another key for Rivals.com to cost-effectively managing their storage growth is Compellent’s Thin Provisioning. Thin Provisioning enables Rivals.com to allocate storage for future growth without having the upfront physical capacity in the SAN. Because Thin Provisioning only consumes physical capacity when the data is actually written by the application, Rivals.com can delay disk purchases and leverage storage disk drive price erosion to get more capacity at a lower cost.
"With our old system, we really had no way to accurately manage capacity. When it was time to add more capacity, it was a long and arduous process. With Compellent we can expand capacity online in less than 2 minutes,"says Gough."
Automated Tiered Storage Creates an Easy Online Archive
In addition to users who can now share tailgate parties online, Rivals.com has over 300 field writers creating and publishing valued sports commentary. Rivals.com expects their photo and video archive to double in the next 8-10 months as user generated content ramps up and video files continue to be added to the site alongside regular editorial features.
Storage Center's Automated Tiered Storage enables Rivals.com to use Fibre Channel disks for database servers that require fast access and lower-cost SATA drives to house a media archive for their content library. "Not all of our content is always active," explains Gough, "and storing all of our user generated video files on expensive drives just doesn’t make sense."
"Thanks in large part to Compellent, our Tailgate TV initiative has been a huge success," concludes Gough. "I would recommend Compellent to anyone interested in an easy to manage, easy to scale storage solution with advanced software features managed by a single intuitive interface."