Website: www.livestream.com. Company Mission. Livestream's mission is to connect people ... application programming inte
Case Study
Livestream
Livestream Connects Millions of People with AMD’s SeaMicro SM15000 Server: Live Events from The New York Times, Facebook, ESPN, SpaceX and Warner Bros. Records demanding service and requires extremely high levels of computing performance. As the company matured, server expansion was becoming a bigger and more expensive problem to solve.
Website: www.livestream.com Company Mission Livestream’s mission is to connect people and live events. Livestream offers event owners a complete set of hardware and software tools to share their events with a growing community online. Applications Node.js, Ruby on Rails, Nginx, Varnish, and Redis Challenges Server expansion was constrained by power requirements in the data center. Solution The SM15000 enabled server expansion without increasing power and space requirements for live web and video serving and transcoding. Results • Increased data center capacity by over 50 percent and computing density over 100 percent in new builds without expanding power requirements • Power savings resulting in a grant from NYSERDA to cover part of the server cost • Efficiently scaled server infrastructure without increasing the overall data center space and power footprint
Connecting People and Live Events Livestream provides event owners a complete set of hardware and software tools to share their live events with a growing community of online viewers. Each month, more than 30 million people watch thousands of events from some of the most recognized media brands in the world. The company has been experiencing astronomical growth by providing some of the most engaging content available over the Internet. For the most popular content, the company operates 1,000+ servers across their data center and the cloud. As Livestream experienced rapid growth, it utilized a data center server infrastructure made up of multiple vendors. The company realized that it needed to standardize its data center operations and implement an infrastructure that would scale with its business. The mix of infrastructure consisted of the following: • Blade servers, 2RU and 1RU servers from multiple vendors • Four PDUs providing approximately 6,500 watts usable per rack • About 15 2RU and 1RU servers per rack, mixed in with other equipment Livestream realized that scaling its data center was a strategic part of the business plan, but due to power restraints, they were not able to expand the number of servers in their data center. In their primary data center, they were only able to install an average of 15 servers in a single rack. Live video transcoding is a very
Livestream evaluated many different servers from the leading vendors, but they did not have the density, power efficiency or the computing power needed. They realized that they needed to make tradeoffs that were not optimal to their business goals of a high density server footprint, reduced power consumption and high powered computing. After rigorous testing and evaluation, Livestream selected the SeaMicro
technology “ SeaMicro provides the highest density servers on the market allowing us to get multiple racks of servers into a quarter of a rack with AMD’s SeaMicro SM15000 system. What’s more, the technology allows us to reduce power consumption and the resulting cost savings goes straight to our bottom line. The SeaMicro SM15000 server also allowed us to double our computing capacity while at the same time, retire our energy inefficient servers.
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Thomas Bonnin Chief Architect Livestream
Case Study
Livestream
SM15000 high density server because it was optimized for Internet applications, reduced power consumption by 50 percent and provided the computing power to transcode live video. The SM15000-XN provides 64 Intel® Xeon® (“Ivy Bridge”) servers in 10 RU. The platform is built around AMD’s SeaMicro Freedom™ Fabric ASIC that contains three key patented technologies: • SeaMicro Input/Output Virtualization Technology (IOVT™) eliminates all but three components from the motherboard —the CPU, DRAM, and the SeaMicro Freedom Fabric ASIC—thereby shrinking the server motherboard to the size of a business card and radically reducing cost, power and space.
The SM15000 allowed Livestream to double its computing capacity in their data center and retire energy inefficient servers. Additionally, they were able to add server capacity without adding more space or power usage. Going forward, Livestream will be able to scale their server infrastructure to meet the demands of their growing business. With over 30 million unique viewers each month, a server infrastructure that is reliable and efficient is paramount to their success. With AMD’s SeaMicro SM15000, Livestream is able to scale its service offering profitably in line with their customer growth.
• SeaMicro TIO™ (Turn it Off) Technology further optimizes the motherboard by consolidating functionality and turning off unused blocks in the CPU and chipset. • SeaMicro Freedom Supercompute Fabric ties together these small, power-efficient motherboards with an industry-leading 1.28 Terabits-per-second supercompute fabric. The business case for the SM15000 was straightforward and factored in costs such as space, power, and network requirements. The overall analysis showed that the SM15000 provided significant savings compared to solutions from the other leading server vendors. The SeaMicro platform was tested to be used for the front end web application, the backend application programming interfaces (API), workflow systems, and streaming infrastructure. Livestream offers unlimited ad-free streaming.
AMD’s SeaMicro solution provided power savings that qualified Livestream for a grant from the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA). NYSERDA was established to help New York meet its energy goals: reducing energy consumption, promoting the use of renewable energy sources, and protecting the environment. As a result, Livestream applied for a grant and was awarded a grant based on an audited proposal and onsite inspection to verify the power savings.
For more information about AMD and the SeaMicro family of high density, low power servers, please visit www.seamicro.com. This document is intended to be used for informational purposes only. It represents the results experienced by one customer in their specific environment and usage scenario, and does not necessarily represent the specific results that other customers may experience. AMD assumes no responsibility or liability of any kind to any person with respect to any reliance on the information presented herein.
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AMD | SeaMicro, Inc. 1237 Arques Avenue, Sunnyvale, CA 94085 USA www.seamicro.com or www.amd.com 800 726-9540
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©2013 Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. All rights reserved. AMD, the AMD Arrow logo, SeaMicro, SeaMicro Freedom Fabric, SeaMicro Freedom Fabric ASIC, SeaMicro IOVT, SM10000-XE and combinations thereof are trademarks of Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. in the United States and/or other jurisdictions. Intel, the Intel logo, and Xeon are trademarks of Intel Corporation in the U.S. and/or other countries. Other names used in this presentation are for identification purposes only and may be trademarks of their respective owners.
