Broadcast Interactive Media uses Zebi-Powered Virtualization

Broadcast Interactive Media is a broad range provider of ad optimization and data services to some of the country’s largest advertisers and broadcasters, including Comcast and DirecTV, and hundreds of TV stations and online media outlets.

The company’s facility offers a variety of services, including its Media Star suite of program scheduling services and its TitanTV online program guide for over-the- air, cable and satellite listings used by more than 1,000 websites. If you’ve ever used on an online program guide, there is a very good chance that it’s powered by TitanTV.

BIM’s proprietary applications are hosted on servers running Windows on what IT manager Tom Trujillo calls ‘aging technology.’ In many cases, BIM is using servers running older operating systems, including Windows Server 2000 and 2003. “We needed a way to keep the older tech alive since the OS and some applications aren’t supported on new tech.”

The solution for Trujillo was to virtualize its 51 physical servers with VMware, enabling them to upgrade to new technology when possible, while maintaining the older technology.

“We rely on our data to make our money. The fact that so many municipalities were trusting Tegile was more than enough for me.”

BIM purchased a Tegile Zebi HA2100 high-availability hybrid array with 25TB capacity connected in an iSCSI SAN connected to the servers and VMs via a Gigabit Ethernet switch. The Zebi array is storing all of the VM data and the VMware host is replicating the servers so they can maintain availability with the HA storage array.

A Tegile technician installed the Zebi HA2100 and then spent an hour with Trujillo.
“I understood everything that this piece of hardware and the software does in under an hour, and it was an easy hour,” said Trujillo. “I was like a kid at Christmas, it was incredible to me. When they say a user-friendly interface, this really is a user-friendly interface.”

Trujillo says the Zebi array has performed exactly as predicted with one exception: he wasn’t prepared for the effectiveness of Tegile’s in-line compression and data deduplication technology, shrinking his storage load for dozens of servers and hundreds of virtual machines down from 21TB down to less than 7TB.

“I’m surprised at the amount of space that it doesn’t use. I would have thought for sure I would have filled this thing up with everything I have,” said Trujillo. “I still have 60% of my Zebi free. I’m trying to figure out how I can fill that space. I’ve still got terabytes upon terabytes of space available to me. I know that I would have filled those up by now with the other products I was looking at.”