Virtualization the Disney Way

You don't have to be a tween to know that the Disney Channel original movie Camp Rock was a summer sensation, drawing some nine million television viewers. To capitalize on the success, Disney decided to post the movie on Disney.com for a day, along with interactive features like the ability to chat online with other viewers, and take polls.

With a window of 60 days to get the movie on the site, Disney's Interactive Media Group relied on a combination of virtualization, load balancing and content delivery networks (CDN). About 25 servers were provisioned for different parts of the architecture to balance the load of the anticipated increased traffic, says Bud Albers, the group's CTO.

The group had done virtualization projects before, but never of this magnitude. The strategy was to scale server capacity based on demand, he says. Deploying a physical infrastructure was not an alternative. "There wasn't time to do it any other way,'' Albers says, since Disney had to gather requirements, features and content, and then come up with a production schedule. The goal, adds Adam Fritz, principal software engineer for the interactive media group, was to ensure capital and operating efficiencies as well as the ability to remain agile by relying upon virtual machines.

Other Disney sites, including ABC news and ESPN, are hosted by the same facility, "so we were able to spread our load and use 25 different machines that weren't at a peak time. We were able to hold the peak load and there were no incremental capital costs," says Albers.

Disney.com also used a dynamically integrated environment incorporating video, game images and community elements, which were rolled out to Disney.com when the site relaunched 18 months ago. The group relied on two CDNs, Akamai Technologies and Limelight Networks, to help meet the volume for multiple types of content delivery. Instead of having the user requests come in to Disney's group, they were sent to nearby CDN nodes, says Fritz.

According to Disney's internal tracking, the site hit a daily record with 3.2 million visitors, increasing traffic to Disney.com by 37 percent on June 23. It received more than 860,000 video plays for the one-day event. Albers says the event proves the scalability of a virtualization scheme, which will be an advantage for future events where huge online traffic spikes are anticipated.

Major events with mass appeal require a flexible architecture and the ability to reallocate existing server capacity, agrees Melanie Posey, a research director at IDC (a sister company to CIO's publisher). "That's the advantage of virtualization technology,'' she says—using a combination of load balancing, CDN and corralling underused servers. "Having the ability to reallocate server capacity that already exists is easier and more time efficient for the company that's providing the content than getting a physical server, installing it and configuring it."