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•Case Study: Ticketmaster

Ticketmaster relies on NetApp to build a rock-solid storage infrastructure that keeps data safe, secure, and highly available, helping ensure customer satisfaction.

Ticketmaster, the world's leading ticketing company, sells tickets through its e-commerce site, 19 telephone call centers, and more than 3,300 retail outlets. It's a complicated business network, where success boils down to one essential moment of truth: when a customer buys a ticket. That's when Ticketmaster's information systems have to be ready to make sure that the customer gets what he or she needs.

"When many thousands of people show up on a Saturday morning to buy tickets for the hottest concert in the country, it's incredibly important that the Ticketmaster infrastructure be solid, respond quickly, and process every single transaction as efficiently as possible," says Sean Moriarty, executive vice president of product technology and operations at Ticketmaster.

That's no simple task. Ticketmaster has seen doubledigit growth in sales over the last five years and now sells some 100 million tickets a year. It serves more than 8,000 business clients worldwide–including hundreds of arenas, stadiums, performing arts venues, and theaters–and increasingly provides tickets to consumers through Ticketmaster.com, which has grown into one of the largest e-commerce sites on the Internet.

Building the Bulletproof Infrastructure
The result of that thinking was a network-attached storage architecture based on NetApp® storage, which works with the company's core Oracle® Databases running on Sun™ Solaris™ servers. "The vendorselection process at Ticketmaster is very rigorous. We have a select handful of vendors, such as Oracle and NetApp, that meet our needs for high performance and high availability and who can interoperate extremely well," says Moriarty.

Ticketmaster's storage systems have evolved and grown over the last few years, and today, they include two high-end NetApp FAS900 series enterprise filers, or dedicated storage devices; 12 NetApp F800 series filers working in four clusters; and three NearStore® appliances, which offer costeffective disk-based nearline storage. Virtually all of the company's data–some 66TB–is handled by NetApp storage systems.

Click Here To Download:
•Case Study: Ticketmaster