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Breaking News - Storage:

Ticketmaster Standardizes On NetApp Unified Storage Solutions

Network Appliance Inc announced that Ticketmaster has selected NetApp as its preferred network storage solution and will migrate its seven regional ticketing processing centers, which generate roughly half of the company's revenue, onto NetApp unified storage. Virtually all of the company's file, database and Web data -- some 66TB -- are now handled by NetApp systems. With sales of approximately 100 million tickets a year and double-digit growth rates, Ticketmaster relies on NetApp solutions to manage huge volumes of production storage and to ensure continuous availability.

"When thousands of people show up on a Saturday morning to buy tickets for the hottest concert in the country, it's imperative that the Ticketmaster infrastructure be solid, respond quickly and process every single transaction as seamlessly as possible," explained Sean Moriarty, executive vice president of technology and operations at Ticketmaster. "We are absolutely storage driven and critically depend on Network Appliance. As they say, the show must go on. If our storage isn't there on one of those Saturday mornings, Ticketmaster isn't there either."

Network Appliance provides a leading production solution in terms of manageability, high availability and disaster recovery:

  • To simplify the ongoing management of their data centers, as well as, to meet demanding performance requirements Ticketmaster consolidated its Oracle Database infrastructure onto NetApp unified storage solutions.
  • To ensure high availability and reliability, Ticketmaster's storage infrastructure includes two high-end NetApp fabric-attached storage (FAS) systems and an additional twelve NetApp systems working in four clusters, with one machine being able to take over immediately if another fails.
  • To ensure rapid recovery and data integrity in the event of a disaster, NetApp SnapMirror and SnapVault software perform high-speed remote replication to multiple NetApp NearStore systems, linking Ticketmaster's main corporate data centers in Los Angeles and Chicago with its disaster recovery site in Detroit.

In the highly complex Ticketmaster infrastructures, NetApp storage systems offer simplicity of configuration and management. Since NetApp supports a single architecture across the product line, from high-end systems to cost-effective nearline storage to affordable entry-level systems suited to remote deployment sites, Ticketmaster is able to leverage NetApp flexibility by quickly (and with minimal risk) introducing new features, products and services.

NetApp solutions simplify all aspects of data management. "Whether we are talking data classification, data assessment, real-time production, or backup and recovery, we know that we have a single-vendor solution, fully integrated and optimized for all stages of the data lifecycle," continued Moriarty. "The Ticketmaster production infrastructure consists of hundreds and hundreds of servers. It's important that as we add to the infrastructure or replace servers, we have access to what effectively becomes a Storage Grid that any server can plug into any time."

"Success in the highly competitive online market requires beating competitors in the race to recognize trends and rapidly deliver new products and services to a growing marketplace," said Patrick Rogers, vice president of marketing at Network Appliance. "For Ticketmaster, that means deploying a flexible storage infrastructure that integrates with existing solutions like Oracle and VERITAS and enables scalable, fast, and simple changes to meet dynamic business needs and customer demands."

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