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All In The Game

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DQI Bureau
New Update

Ever wondered about the IT infrastructure

satellite TV channels have at the backend? Here we present an up close view of

one of leaders in sports entertainment: ESPN-Star Sports (ESS). Over the years

the channel has revolutionized sports broadcasting. ESPN STAR Sports is a 50:50

joint venture between two of the world's leading cable and satellite

broadcasters, ESPN and STAR.

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ESS also has extensive on-line portals such as espnstar.com,

espnstar.com.cn, and espnstar.com.tw to interact with millions of users

providing them with in-depth sports news, results, and competitions. This

multilingual, online platform is closely integrated with ESPN and STAR Sports on

air networks and has established the sites as the number one on-line sports

destination in their respective markets.

At a Glance

Issue:

structured cabling



Reason: difficulty in managing sites and huge Internet traffic


Vendor/solution: Reliance Infocomm-IDC; Web/Application and
Database setup

Benefits

  • Virtually

    dedicated firewall

  • Network

    based Intrusion detection service is provided to monitors

  • Creation

    of a pro-active IT infrastructure backbone.

ESPN had setup its complete Web applications and database

servers at two data centers in the US and Hong Kong respectively. Interestingly

close to around 80% of the Internet traffic was from India, but despite that

ESPN out of concern of quality of service and Internet bandwidth in India had

decided to place its setup at the US and Hong Kong. In time ESPN found it

difficult to manage and maintain its sites as the setup was hosted in two data

centers. Making matters more complicated is the company's development team

based out of Bangalore. So facilities spread across geographically was a key

challenge.

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As we take a closer look at the IT set up, ESPN STAR was

running their online Web and application servers on three Dual CPU, 500 Mhz, 1

GB RAM Intel systems. All these servers were load balanced to take care of huge

Internet traffic. At the backend, Oracle Database was running on two Sun-402-R

Quad CPU, 2 GB RAM machines. Further 5 Sunfire V240 servers were used to run

other applications and Oracle Database. ESPN was incurring huge cost in getting

managed service support from these data centers coupled up with traveling cost

of its own people for important meetings and activities.

ESPN considered the option of migrating complete setup from

US and Hong Kong to India, but were looking at a service provider who can

provide high uptime, server with complete managed support, high quality Internet

bandwidth, and host of other managed services. Objective was to have more

control and ease of operation, better service experience to end-users, and at

the same time reduce high cost of hosting in the US and Hong Kong.

After doing a due diligence of various vendors, ESPN STAR

chose Reliance Infocomm-IDC. To this end Reliance provided all the hardware to

run Web/Application and Database setup. Meanwhile on the server side multiple

Sun Fire V440 Servers for Oracle 8i / 9i database, and Six Sun Fire V240 Server

with Solaris 8 Operating System for other applications were deployed. All the

servers are provided with complete managed support with high up time guarantees.

For the purpose of security, Reliance has offered all the services and support

to ensure highest safety.

Some of the added benefits ESS accrued are the isolated VLAN

of the servers and managed firewall with customized policies of customer thus

giving the benefit of a virtually dedicated firewall. Network based Intrusion

detection service is provided to monitor all the traffic coming to / going from

customer's server for preventive detection of attacks / misuses. For secure

access to servers through Internet, Reliance has configured a secure IPSec VPN

tunnel at its VPN concentrator cum firewall box, and has provided the IPSec

client to ESPN, which can be installed at their end PC. ESS also made use of

other managed services offered by the vendor and created a pro-active IT

infrastructure backbone.

Shrikanth G



shrikanthg@cybermedia.co.in

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