Infrastructure as a Service Model Meets Intense On-Demand Needs and Mitigates Risk from Multiple Points of Failure.
“Building out the capacity we needed with conventional data centers would have cost at least three times what we’re now spending, and still wouldn’t give us the flexibility to scale up on demand.” Susan Weber, VP of Technology
Cloud Computing: IT Operating Costs Cut 50% for advertising analytics company.Infrastructure as a Service Model Meets Intense On-Demand Needs and Mitigates Risk from Multiple Points of Failure
Background
Factor Technology Group, a provider of enterprise advertising analytics, faced a serious challenge in meeting increased customer demand due to limitations of its IT infrastructure. InfoPlus International was engaged to deliver a cloud-based solution to handle very large, highly variable volumes of application traffic, while significantly reducing Factor TG’s cost structure and risk profile.
San Francisco-based Factor Technology Group (Factor TG) measures the effectiveness of advertising, and provides data-driven optimization to improve marketing ROI. Typical customers are large-scale advertisers from the automotive, financial services, and retail sectors. The results of Factor TG’s comprehensive approach are significant; for example, the company saved one customer tens of millions of dollars in marketing spend while maintaining advertising effectiveness. Achieving such results, however, demands a robust IT infrastructure able to process millions of Web site hits and hundreds of thousands of survey returns over very short time periods.
The Challenge
Factor TG’s operation relied on a traditional data center model, with co-location facilities in Oakland and Hong Kong. These data centers were initially capable of handing customers’ online traffic, but as volume expanded over recent years, a number of limitations were exposed:
- Critical data capture was impaired by network bandwidth bottlenecks
- Multiple points of failure were identified
- Managing higher average loads and frequently occurring spikes was becoming prohibitively expensive
In addition, the IT infrastructure was not flexible enough to support major new functionality the company had developed, thereby limiting Factor TG’s ability to take full advantage of market opportunities.
The Solution
Recognizing the need for both immediate assistance and a longer-term partnership, Factor TG engaged InfoPlus International (IPI) to assume responsibility for the strategic management of its IT operations.
“We knew that IPI had a strong reputation as a lifecycle consultant with a very experienced staff,” said Susan Weber, Senior Vice President of Technology at Factor TG. “What really set them apart was not just their breadth of services, but the responsiveness and practical approach they demonstrated.”
IPI first applied its proven evaluation methodology to Factor TG’s infrastructure, and determined that critical architectural issues created multiple points of failure in the two data centers. IPI recommended deployment of load balancers to better match traffic loads with server capacity and to improve availability from the individual data centers.
Once these initial measures were in place to reinforce business continuity, the IPI team conducted an in-depth analysis of Factor TG’s longer term IT infrastructure requirements. IPI’s assessments are platform-agnostic, focusing on business cases that consider TCO, ROI payback, and the viability of implementing alternative solutions in real-world conditions.
Given Factor TG’s needs, IPI recommended a custom solution to migrate the IT infrastructure to the cloud in order to realize a number of benefits not possible with physical data centers.
- First, the cloud solution would eliminate bottlenecks that restricted data flow into the data centers caused by the limited network bandwidth.
- Second, Factor TG would gain the ability to expand the number of servers in service based on its real-time volume of application traffic. By employing this ”utility” computing model, the company could expand and contract server and network bandwidth on demand, while only paying for the CPU, RAM, and bandwidth actually used.
- Last, IPI’s cloud-based solution would completely eliminate single points of failure at a fraction of the cost of physical data centers through comprehensive coverage of firewalls, multiple data center redundancies for power, fire suppression, cooling, as well as active/active high availability server clusters.
In order to further control operating expenses, IPI also recommended and deployed a “lights out” data center model for Factor TG that delivered network alerts and notifications through the Nagios network monitoring application.
Results
Migrating to the cloud made a dramatically positive impact on Factor TG’s application performance, capacity, and cost structure. “I estimate that we cut our monthly operating costs from the two data centers by 50% with IPI’s cloud computing solution,” commented Weber. “Building out the capacity we needed with conventional data centers would have cost at least three times what we’re now spending, and still wouldn’t give us the flexibility to scale up on demand.”
The customized “Infrastructure as a Service” solution that IPI developed for Factor TG has effectively doubled its baseline capacity, and can accommodate spikes of 10X more Web traffic and survey volume than the prior data centers. Weber noted that IPI’s approach is truly enduring. “When a customer’s traffic jumps 300% for a 24-hour period, we’re confident the system can handle it and that our costs will only increase incrementally. And that means our IT infrastructure is no longer an obstacle to growth – in fact, it will help us to grow.”
