WWE Slams Downtime With Marathon's everRun® Software
THE COMPANY
World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) is an integrated media organization and recognized leader in global entertainment, which consists of a portfolio of businesses that create and deliver original content 52 weeks a year to a global audience. WWE is committed to family-friendly content across all of its platforms including television programming, pay-per-view, digital media and publishing. The company's programming is broadcast in more than 145 countries and 30 languages, reaching more than 500 million households worldwide. WWE is headquartered in Stamford, Connecticut, with offices in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, London, Shanghai, Tokyo and Toronto.
THE SITUATION
In order to entertain millions of viewers globally each week, WWE has to create and deliver high-quality television programs to different broadcasters around the world. With tight production schedules and endless deadlines, any downtime on the company's video and audio editing applications would have a tremendous effect on the pre-production and the creative team's ability to deliver quality shows. All audio and visual elements incorporated by the production team are extremely critical in order to provide superior content to viewers.
WWE's production infrastructure includes five mission-critical servers that support all audio and visual elements as well as international distribution of the domestic product. These include their digital video archive, shot log database, and music licensing servers. The pre-production and creative teams depend on these systems to produce multiple television programs under tight schedules and deadlines. With limited IT support, it is imperative that these systems are protected from any issues that might cause downtime.
Without access to these servers due to downtime, the WWE production staff would not be able to access audio, editing, or digital video information that they need to produce a high-quality finished program, and they would be forced to delay air time.
"Television is time-critical and it's our responsibility to deliver high-quality shows on time, all the time," said Lionel Hightower, vice president of engineering, WWE. "Meeting deadlines and delivering a final product is critical to the business as well as keeping our valued viewers engaged and entertained by WWE content."
Much of WWE's content is repurposed and modified to be released in additional countries. Furthermore, WWE develops highly customized versions of their content. In order to have this content available at any given time, they digitize their tape library and store all their previous programming content. The current digital video archive has over 30,000 hours of content, some of which spans four decades. To make sure that no critical data is lost and that there is constant availability of this content to the creative team, the company needs to ensure operational continuity and high availability of these critical applications and databases.
"We needed an availability solution that could keep each of our applications up-and-running without requiring specialized scripting or a large amount of IT support," reported Anthony Landi, director of engineering, WWE.
THE SOLUTION
With the help of technology partner Grass Valley, the world's second largest broadcast and professional solutions supplier, WWE evaluated several application availability solutions. WWE selected Marathon because of its everRun® offering, which they found to be the most robust and cost effective option available in the marketplace. Marathon was ideal for WWE because it enabled both consolidation and high availability solutions to be implemented at once.
"With limited IT resources, everRun's automated set-up and maintenance were a perfect fit for our environment. In addition, the fact that the product was 64-bit aware was a huge selling point because we operate a 64-bit digital music server," added Dan Keene, senior broadcast engineer, WWE.
WWE now uses everRun to protect five of their critical servers, including the company's video tape library, two databases that run mission-critical information on editing sequences, (one that tracks over 15,000 hours of WWE content, and another that tracks 100,000 hours of video tapes). In addition, everRun protects a database server for music licensing, which stores more than 10 terabytes of digital music that is used in daily production.
Together with Grass Valley, WWE implemented Marathon's solutions with ease, providing automatic failover of critical applications, as well as added geographic diversity within the facility through location of servers in separate rooms.
THE RESULTS
Since the implementation of Marathon's everRun software, WWE has experienced 100 percent uptime allowing the WWE to deliver high quality entertainment to their millions of viewers.
"We've had some instances of server memory problems, but with Marathon our systems kept running and no one knew there was an issue," said Keene. "everRun performed perfectly and should be the de-facto standard for the industry."
As WWE grows and expands, the company will continue to rely on everRun for continuous protection from downtime. "We will look to Marathon to help ensure operational continuity and application availability so that we can continue to entertain our worldwide base of loyal fans," said Keene.
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