Cartoon Company Uses Cloud Computing to Reduce Data Center Costs

CIO — Back in the 1990s and early 2000s, every business wanted to show off its glass house full of racks of green-lit servers. Today, Toronto-based Cookie Jar Entertainment believes the smaller the in-house data center, the better, and showing investors what good use you're making of cost-efficient cloud computing is a source of pride.

"We have very little infrastructure in-house. Our headquarters are in a 100-year-old building so there's no capacity for a data room the size we'd need anyway," says Mike Haas, director of IT at Cookie Jar, which is known for producing and distributing children's cartoon and live-action programming. Cookie Jar's library of nearly 6,000 half-hour television episodes features some of the world's most recognizable series including Caillou, Inspector Gadget, Arthur, The Doodlebops and Johnny Test.

The company's dual role as developer and distributor puts a heavy burden on IT. Not only does the team have to support the intense demands of massively multiplayer online game (MMOG) systems from its Web portal, but also have enough server capacity and bandwidth to digitally distribute its show libraries.

A gradual move to the cloud

Although Haas had dabbled in cloud computing for one-off applications such as hosted email, it wasn't until 2008, when Cookie Jar acquired California-based DIC Entertainment, that the cloud took center stage. "Cookie Jar and DIC had a lot of infrastructure locations—four—and consolidation and integration became our main focus," he says.

At the same time, the company began relying heavily upon virtualization. The rigorous requirements of MMOGs to support real-time chat, rich graphics and more were burdening servers and other infrastructure. To free up hardware, Haas decided to couple virtualization with cloud computing.

To start, Cookie Jar condensed in-house and hosted assets to two sites, in Toronto and Rochester, N.Y., both hosted by CentriLogic. The Rochester site is home to all public-facing Web servers, MMOGs and Web games. "Instead of having to manage and pay multiple providers, all of that is now under one roof," Haas says.

The 100-employee Cookie Jar, which has three IT staff members, fully outsources management of the dozen physical servers in Rochester to CentriLogic.

The IT team is more hands-on for the 29 physical servers located in Toronto, which serves corporate needs such as development. "We control most of our servers and storage, and they manage other aspects such as monitoring, backups, patching and updates," Haas says.

Operational and financial benefits

Cookie Jar can remotely scale servers up and down as needed at both sites, which Haas has found far more responsive and cost-effective than having infrastructure among numerous vendors or on-site. For instance, if developers require more RAM to test their games, it is automatically provisioned in the cloud.

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