iBiquity
HD Radio Pioneer iBiquity Digital Handles Explosive Growth
Introduction
iBiquity Digital Corporation, a pioneer in digital radio, is revolutionizing the AM and FM broadcasting industry with high-definition radio, or “HD Radio®”. This breakthrough in broadcasting technology allows digital radio signals to ride the same frequencies as analog AM/FM radio, delighting audiences with crystal clear, rich, CD-like sound and increasing the number of available channels. Stations can even send out extras such as text or data services to describe songs or put news and entertainment at listeners’ fingertips.
iBiquity is the only FCC-approved HD Radio provider and is actively partnering with broadcasters, receiver component and broadcast equipment manufacturers, and retailers in the United States and around the world. Its broad patent portfolio and licensing agreements are fueling a swift and successful adoption of this revolutionary technology.
While iBiquity is transforming the radio world, it is also experiencing exponential internal growth—just one chip design team grew from 1/2TB to 6TB in a few years. Naturally, with this growth comes strain on iBiquity’s IT infrastructure. It became very clear that to handle this growth, its IT technology and architecture needed a major overhaul, particularly on the storage side.
Customer Challenge
iBiquity and its 130 employees use 420 computers, 30 servers and a gigantic 36 terabytes of data. As business took off, several major storage-related challenges surfaced.
iBiquity’s storage needs were growing exponentially. New chips are developed built into new transmitters and receivers and deployed into the field. Real-time testing data comes in and is saved for analysis and design refinement. Archives of this data remain for months, even years, to ensure complete compatibility and test scenario duplication. As the adoption of this technology gains momentum and more stations come online, creating a tremendous amount more in storage. Any of this data can be requested by the FCC at any moment, so performance is important, but for the business, reliability and affordability are paramount.
Some of iBiquity’s severs were using Direct Attached Storage (DAS) with its inherent issues—underutilization and downtime whenever storage needed to scale. These local disks were spread across multiple servers and iBiquity used Veritas NetBackup to back up these disks up to tape. Performance and scheduling issues resulted in significant delays. In an attempt to alleviate this issue, mission-critical data was being copied to the New Jersey location for offsite data protection using Adaptec’s Snap Enterprise Data Replicator (EDR) software. Snap EDR was not as efficient over the WAN as iBiquity had hoped, and replication was too slow.
iBiquity also faced aging devices while the amount of critical data was exploding. It is well acquainted with various appliance storage systems, including NetApp’s FAS series, EMC, and Snap Servers. For various cost, maintenance agreement, usable lifespan, and reliability reasons these products could no longer suffice. For example, iBiquity had already lost critical data three times with the Adaptec Snap Server and was desperate to avoid this again. While it was economical, it just wasn’t reliable enough.
It was time to completely upgrade the storage infrastructure at iBiquity to enterprise-class reliability and stability, with the capacity for lots of secondary-tier storage, on a budget.
Customer Solution
Desmond Fuller, an IT Director with 18 years of experience working with storage technologies, was on the lookout for a storage appliance which had a proven background and a low cost. He was willing to give up some of the fancy datacenter features that were unnecessary for his needs, so he was seeking a product developed with the needs of small-to-medium businesses in mind. When NetApp announced the new StoreVault product line, he was very receptive.
StoreVault was built on NetApp’s reliable and enterprise-hardened Data ONTAP operating system. This seemed like just what his company needed, and it even offered replication and data management tools. He started with two units and they were an immediate success, so he expanded to a total of eight production StoreVault units in his environment.
Today, five new StoreVault units have replaced the EMC, NetApp, and Snap Server appliances. They are run as NAS units serving the needs of his Windows and Linux front office and engineering development systems. An additional StoreVault functions as a SAN for Exchange and SQL server data over iSCSI.
StoreVault Replication has completely replaced Snap EDR, reliably replicating mission-critical data from Maryland to New Jersey during off-peak hours. This replication is done during off-peak hours over a 4MB Ethernet link, and yields significantly better results than Snap EDR, since it is native to the StoreVault and highly efficient when moving changed blocks. StoreVault Replication also performs intelligent partial transfers, eliminating the need for full re-transfers when recovering from broken connections or other WAN hiccups.
Tape performance has been improved through the use of automatic Snapshots on the StoreVault units, allowing the backups to occur at any time without impacting production performance. Users can restore their own data at any time from a snapshot. Tape backups no longer need to be the primary line of defense against lost data, and are need to be performed less frequently. Desmond is even using NDMP to do “serverless backups” from his StoreVault units to his tape library!
Desmond’s StoreVault units are armed with RAID-DP™, which allows them to prevent data loss even if two drives fail concurrently, and allows him to feel totally secure. The results speak for themselves with digital clarity: iBiquity has not lost a single byte of data since the StoreVault units were installed.
Customer Success
“StoreVault has exceeded my expectations,” says Desmond, “It gives me superior reliability without cutting a deep hole in my pocket. The dollars rule in this game.” He adds “I had to get out of my older and feebler products without breaking the bank. I’m so impressed now, that I’d consider paying even more to get this kind of quality.” Modern iSCSI boot-from-SAN options are very attractive to him and he is considering purchasing some iSCSI HBA cards to enable this.
Desmond’s future plans includes backing up his Exchange store to another StoreVault unit using NetBackup, and then creating snapshots of the backups as well as replicating them and also moving them to tape via NDMP. That means three times the email protection, enabled by products and features he has already invested in.Customer BenefitsStoreVault Advanced Protection Architecture makes each StoreVault unit stronger, more resilient, and ten thousand times more reliable than its RAID 5 competitors. The price tag for this has been about $100,000 for eight StoreVault units, including all software licenses and options. In using them, iBiquity has avoided overkill investment in Enterprise-class products and maintenance, and also stopped poorly performing low-end systems from losing data.
For Desmond Fuller and iBiquity, tuning into the StoreVault was the right choice.
| Technical Environment | |
| Operating Systems | Windows 2003 Server, Red Hat Enterprise LInux |
| Critical Software Deployed | SQL Server, Exchange Server, Wiki, CVS and the virtualization software OpenVZ, domain controllers, Blackberry server |
| Backup Software | Veritas NetBackup with an NDMP option |
| Tape Hardware | Overland tape libraries and LTO2 tape drives |
