Digital media firm drives down operating costs with ILM

December 6, 2004 (Storage Networking World) When you're in the music business, you need to keep up with the ever-changing tastes of music listeners.
For Loudeye Corp., a Seattle-based provider of global digital media solutions to customers such as Amazon.com, Apple iTunes, AT&T Wireless and Microsoft Corp.'s MSN, that means being able to quickly move around 4.5 million digitized audio files and related data in accordance with the whims of music lovers and demands of music retailers. It also means having a storage system that can store all that data without breaking the bank.
That's why Loudeye found it necessary last year to move beyond its two-tier storage system to a three-tier system based on information life-cycle management (ILM) principles.
"We're dealing with a lot of media in a lot of different formats, as well as the different bit rates that different players require," says Joe Baldini, vice president of IT at the company. Loudeye serves over 4 million song samples through more than 30 Internet music retail sites monthly. It recently launched the first mobile music store for AT&T Wireless. That store gives subscribers access to a 750,000-track catalog through their handsets.
Loudeye's original storage system consisted of Storagetek Powderhorn tape library systems that enabled mass archiving of raw music files prior to encoding. The company used EMC Clariion and Symmetrix systems, as well as some homegrown IDE and SCSI storage systems, for hosting, processing and delivering encoded content.
The Powderhorn system acted as a nearline tape system, with applications developed in-house helping to move audio and video files onto the disk-based storage for staging purposes. From there, "We could stream them on demand or put them on an FTP site for digital service providers or labels to pick up the encoded files," Baldini explains.
Still, Loudeye was experiencing a lot of throughput challenges because of the large number of files it needed to move from tape to disk, which was a slow process. That's what inspired the company to look at the situation from an ILM perspective. "We wanted the ability to make intelligent business decisions as to what should be online and nearline, and what should be backed up to an offsite system for disaster situations," Baldini says.
An online catalog
The need for that decision-making ability is what led the company to a three-tier system, made possible with the addition of a 100TB StorageTek/LSI Logic SANtricity SAN, which now stores Loudeye's online catalog0 of audio files. Six Linux-based servers from Silicon Graphics are on the front end of the SAN via Brocade 3850 16-port Fibre Channel switches. Each server is responsible for managing 20TB of storage. The three 9840 Powderhorns serve as both nearline tape and a backup/recovery system. In all, Loudeye now maintains 600TB to 700TB of nearline data, as well as 200TB of backup data.
Thanks to in-house-developed open-source and Java applications, Loudeye can now identify the most frequently accessed or requested audio files, take those files off the nearline system, compress them and put them into the online catalogue. On the SAN, the applications help IT classify digital files according to their popularity. As data starts to age, the applications move it back to the tape-based nearline system. As a result, there's much less need to move files back and forth from tape to disk.
A typical scenario would

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