Kargo
Mobile content distributor improves scalability, reliability and availability with StoreVault
Customer Overview
Kargo is one of the largest U.S. mobile content distributors, with an exclusive and industry-leading catalog of ringtones, wallpapers, and games. The company has developed and delivered compelling mobile entertainment applications for major partners like US Weekly, Premiere, TV Guide, Star, Weekly World News, Vibe and SPIN. Kargo also distributes content for leading wireless operators, including Cingular Wireless, Sprint Nextel, T-Mobile, Verizon Wireless, Alltel, and Cricket Wireless. In addition, Kargo is a leader in mobile content portals in the U.S. with over 900,000 unique shoppers to date.
Customer Challenges
Kargo employs 15 full time employees (each with a desktop computer) and a mix of 20 Dell PowerEdge and IBM xSeries 336 servers with a total of 2.1TB. The web server farm runs a Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP stack and serves content to wireless operators, media partners and their end customers. One server hosts Microsoft Exchange and the rest provide various test beds. An Adaptec Snap Server 4500 hosted Apache docroots and Tomcat webapps data via NFS mounts. Several problems existed with this arrangement.
First, Kargo’s business required very high Service Level Agreements. Their wireless operator and media partners depended on Kargo to maintain a reliable and highly available service for their brands. Faced with these stringent requirements, Kargo was worried about the Adaptec Snap Server’s performance and reliability in the case of a disk failure. Jim McConnel, System Administrator with Kargo, remembered a previous painful experience and did not want to risk data on a Snap Server again. In addition, the Snap Server’s NFS performance during read/write commands seemed poor, especially when another write command was executing in parallel. At the same time, Kargo’s data was growing at 15 percent every year and had hit 85 percent utilization of the 2 TB space in the Adaptec Snap Server, which Jim could not expand. Lastly, backup was a key problem area. A manual rsync copy job moved data to secondary storage on a consumer-grade Infrant ReadyNAS product, located next to the Snap Server. There was no offsite backup or disaster recovery, and the Kargo team could not use this process to backup the Exchange data or create tape copies for offsite.
Solution: StoreVault S500
Jim McConnell and his CEO, Harry Kargman, started scouting for a solution. They depend on simple, off-the-shelf, commodity hardware and hire “off-the-shelf” operations personnel. They looked at Red Hat’s Global File System, but were unwilling to upgrade from Fedora Core to Red Hat Enterprise Linux across their infrastructure, plus the additional training and increased complexity.
Jim was familiar with NetApp and had been impressed with the performance, but the NetApp FAS270 and IBM’s rebranded NetApp products were too expensive for Harry’s budget. Jim Addlesberger, principal at Navigate Storage, recommended the StoreVault S500, bringing NetApp’s Data ONTAP operating system at an affordable price. While the basic setup of web servers accessing content via NFS remains same, all the data has been transferred from the Adaptec Snap Server to StoreVault. The move was simple and required a simple opening of two NFS windows; one for StoreVault and another for Adaptec, to copy the data over.
Customer Experience
Jim says “It is a NetApp with lower price tag and it makes me very comfortable. The migration from our old Snap Server to the new StoreVault was painless.”
Jim’s new StoreVault S500 unit consists of eight 500GB drives and a SCSI card. The initial installation was very simple—involving just 3 steps: racking the system, turning the power on, and running the StoreVault Manager configuration tool. Data migration was a simple copy between two NFS exports, one on the StoreVault and another on the Snap Server. The web server farm continues to use NFS to access network data. Jim says “I had the unit up and running in less than one hour.” NavigateStorage provided the right equipment in the right timeframe and made the whole experience even richer through further product and solution recommendations.
Customer Benefits
The new StoreVault can grow without any downtime and provides up to 6 TB of space - enough to accommodate Kargo’s data growth for several years to come. NFS performance has improved and no read/write delays have been experienced since installation. StoreVault’s RAID-DP protects against dual drive failures, while the rest of the Advanced Protection Architecture features like continuous drive monitoring, rapid RAID rebuild and a global hot spare keep Kargo at 100 percent uptime to date. Harry paid about $11,000 for his StoreVault. Harry and Jim can now focus on growing media and carrier partnerships without storage concerns, and tape backup with a backup software package and an autoloader to centralize backup and offsite archives is the next step.
You could say that Kargo has really dialed in the perfect solution.
