Sheffield International Venues

Background

Sheffield International Venues (SIV) is one of Europe's largest sport, leisure and entertainment companies. It manages and operates a portfolio of fourteen wholly owned and managed venues including Don Valley Stadium, Sheffield Arena, Sheffield City Hall and Ice Sheffield. Each year it runs up to 2000 events and generates about 2 million ticket sales.

Requirement

Today's consumers demand instant access to information and near-instant fulfillment. They do not care about the complexity of fulfilling ticketing purchases for multiple venues and events, but need a seamless experience and lightning-fast delivery.

SIV had already invested heavily in IT infrastructure as the number of venues increased over the past ten years. It now needed to overhaul its legacy, non-Windows ticketing system significantly to keep pace with an anticipated rise in demand, much of which would come through the Internet. This meant a need for hugely expanded storage within a highly available and resilient system and an increased need to plan for business continuity.

Solution

ISC Networks had helped SIV to respond to a previous challenge in 2003, when the opening of Ice Sheffield at the start of the school holidays led to a sharp and unpredicted spike in the loading on its EPOS system. ISC worked fast to install a storage area network (SAN) and high-specification servers, enabling the rapid and successful migration of the EPOS system. It was the foundation for a successful ongoing partnership. Michael Cook, ICT Manager at SIV explained: "ISC showed a genuine interest in what we were trying to do. I was happy with their response, service and competitive pricing: it grew from there."

In 2005, after investing in a multi-site WAN to link the group's box offices, SIV needed a partner to help it meet the ticketing challenge. It chose ISC Networks once more. "ISC came in with not only the most competitive solution, but the one that made the most sense" says Michael Cook.

The system would need to cope with the dual demands of ticketing and existing EPOS traffic and incorporate disaster recovery (DR) management. ISC Networks recommended the Veritas Cluster Server for replicating SQL data from ticketing and EPOS transactions in real time. It protects against unplanned downtime of applications and provides a local clustering solution to protect against server failure and to replicate data and failover to a DR location in the event of site loss.

ISC Networks recommended a centralised system based on a SAN. The HP Enterprise Virtual Array was selected as the principal enterprise-level storage device located centrally, and the HP Modular Storage Array for lower-cost storage at the secondary site. Together, these would ensure the highest possible levels of resilience, availability and simplicity of management in a cost-effective configuration.

For fast and reliable backups that would not impact server or application performance the HP Enterprise Modular Library was chosen. It was supported via the continuous data protection provided by BakBone NetVault software which backs up data to within seconds for the lowest possible data loss. Both solutions are highly scalable.

"Implementation was very good" said Michael Cook. "At early technical meetings ISC talked through our expectations and explained the solution. It was quite obvious that they knew what they were talking about; they made no empty promises and the first venue went live in time for its opening."

The strong partnership between SIV and ISC Networks meant that even unexpected occurrences could be dealt with. The ticketing database ultimately grew far faster than SIV originally anticipated, to almost 40GB. The scalability of the system meant that storage capacity could be expanded rapidly when the rate of expansion suddenly escalated. An ISC storage consultant worked on consecutive night shifts to remedy the problem. Michael explains "ISC's full cooperation to solve this issue was invaluable." 

Solution Summary

• Hewlett-Packard StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA) for enterprise-level storage
• Hewlett-Packard Modular Storage Array (MSA) for the disaster recovery site
• Veritas Cluster Server for data replication and application failover between sites
• Hewlett-Packard StorageWorks Enterprise Modular Library (EML) tape backup
• BakBone NetVault with SAN-level backup

Benefits

The expected benefits were realised, but some hidden ones also proved a bonus:

• Greater revenue in ticket sales came from high availability and a configuration that prevents any single point of failure.
• More tickets sold online means less staff manning phones; they were able to scale down and consolidate some operations.
• Access to data via a Windows-based system became easier internally, which also benefited the marketing and telesales teams.
• By choosing hardware with a high level of scalability, SIV now has a system built to last.
• Less valuable data is stored at lower cost through intelligent configuration of the storage solution.
• Resilience has been improved across the network for server and application availability.
• Investment in scalable hardware has made software applications more accessible and that investment has been leveraged.