With almost 20 years of experience in the media industry and a presence in eight European countries and the U.S., Arkena provides a global solution for media management. Arkena serves more than 1,500 customers including broadcasters, telecom operators, VOD platforms, content owners and corporations in managing their linear and on-demand workflows. These workflows, relying on a CDN, generate high volumes of log data – up to 200 GB per day – which need to be managed, processed and stored in real time for analytics purposes.
“In the media industry, quality of experience is just as important as quality of content. One in five viewers will abandon poor streaming video experiences immediately,” said Reda Benzair, vice president of technical development content workflow and CDN South at Arkena. “Our customers want real-time control not only over the content but also over the data, which is why we provide very granular analysis drilling down to fifteen different metrics such as volume, session duration and unique users. This can be split out over 15 different dimensions including country, city, user agent, browser and HTTP status code. Having implemented the Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP protocol, we were experiencing increased volume and speed of data, and our previous system could no longer support our needs. We turned to Hortonworks and HDP to enable us to quickly provide the big data architecture required to meet our customers’ evolving demands.”
When comparing Hadoop offerings, Arkena looked for a fully open source option that wouldn’t lock the company in to one vendor or technology. Arkena also wanted to be aligned with the open source development community of Hadoop. Finally, Arkena required a fully certified and supported software stack, and Hortonworks’ top-rated support capabilities were important. For these reasons, the media services company selected HDP, the industry’s only 100-percent open source platform built on Apache™ Hadoop®. Arkena industrialized its infrastructure on HDP 2.3, the completely open source Apache Hadoop data platform architected for the enterprise.
“We’re seeing increasing demand across the gamut of organizations from web-based startups to established leaders like Arkena for solutions that will provide a high level of data insight to enable organizations to deliver a competitive service to their customers,” said Andy Leaver, vice president of international operations at Hortonworks. “HDP is both cost effective and designed to integrate readily with existing IT infrastructure, easing the way to deploying, managing and ultimately monetizing data.”
