Online service providers epitomize the IT challenges most enterprises face today: Their competitiveness depends on maximizing the availability, scalability, and performance of their infrastructure in the most energy-efficient and cost-effective way possible.

Case in point: Gracenote Inc., the world’s leading online indexing service for making digital music searchable and manageable. The Emeryville, Calif.-based company processes billions of music searches each year from hundreds of millions of users round the world, displaying titles, composers, artists, and other relevant information. Gracenote also provides services such as song playlists, digital media recommendations, and music discovery via cell phone.

For Gracenote’s services to be effective, its IT infrastructure must be available 24/7. It must be scalable enough to meet peak and growing demand. It must deliver screaming database performance for fast customer searches. And to keep prices down for licensees such as Apple iTunes, Yahoo Music Jukebox, Winamp, and leading electronics makers such as Panasonic, Nokia, Samsung, and Sony Ericsson, Gracenote’s infrastructure must also be cost-effective on both acquisition and operating costs.

Gracenote meets these requirements with approximately 300 rack-mount and blade servers from Sun Microsystems Inc., of Santa Clara, Calif. All of those devices run Sun’s Solaris 10 operating system and feature 64-bit AMD Opteron™ processors.

“We need fast performance, and when you have hardware in multiple co-location facilities, some of which are remote from your offices, you need to put in equipment that is highly reliable,” says Matthew Leeds, vice president of operations for Gracenote. “That’s why we chose Sun’s x64 blade servers running AMD Opteron processors and Solaris. As we adopt more of Sun’s AMD-powered blades, we anticipate that we will maintain low capital and operating expenses. This allows us to go to market with low prices for our customers, improving our internal flexibility and our competitive position in the marketplace.”

Lightning Fast Performance
Gracenote began 10 years ago as a simple service for identifying the content of audio CDs played on personal computers. Today its database contains information on more than 80 million tracks and 6 million CDs in 80 natural languages. The company receives about 60 to 80 million queries per day from 2.5 million unique users. During peak periods such as Christmas and New Year’s Day, when users try out their new iPods, those numbers can double. Such demand spikes are what spurred Leeds to build a redundant infrastructure able to support 150 percent of typical capacity. It also has three co-location facilities, so if one site goes down, the remaining two can still handle peak loads.

A typical Gracenote query takes a lightning fast 15 milliseconds. Such speed is only possible by placing the whole database in core memory. “If you have to search on disk, you won’t get that speed,” says Leeds.

Thus Gracenote’s architecture puts a premium on fast memory access. “Every application has a bottleneck, whether it’s network I/O, disk I/O, or something else, and ours is CPU-to-memory speed,” Leeds says. As a result, Gracenote carefully looked for server technology with speedy interplay between processors and memory. After extensive testing, Gracenote found that Sun servers powered by AMD Opteron processors and the Solaris 10 operating system deliver the fastest performance for its particular systems.

In the AMD64 architecture, each AMD Opteron processor features an integrated memory controller. Additionally, a high-speed HyperTransport™* technology link connects processors and cores. The result is high data throughput, low memory latency, and exceptional non-uniform memory access (NUMA) support, all of which contribute to fast application performance. “That’s why the AMD Opteron [processor] works so well for us,” says Leeds.

Gracenote delivers its core service from 12 Sun Fire V40z servers, each running Solaris 10 and powered by four dual-core processors with 32GB of memory. Leeds has embraced Solaris for its linear multithreading, which enhances the performance of Gracenote’s highly multithreaded applications.

Moving to Sun Blade Systems
Gracenote’s early success with Sun and AMD has led it to deepen its commitment to their technologies. Gracenote provides a service for cell phone users that allows devices to identify digital media they “hear” on, say, a car radio. The company acquired this “discovery” technology, which relies on database lookups much as Gracenote’s core service does, from another firm in 2007. Initially, the system used rack-mount servers running Linux® and non-AMD processors. Once Gracenote had the application in house, however, its engineers began investigating how to enhance its performance, reliability, scalability, and cost.

The solution for Gracenote turned out to be switching to Sun Blade systems powered by AMD Opteron processors and running Solaris 10. In the second half of 2007, Gracenote replaced more than two dozen of its previous servers with two Sun Blade 8000 P Modular Systems, populated with 20 Sun Blade X8420 Server Modules. Each of these featured four dual-core AMD Opteron processors with either 8GB or 32GB of memory.

The performance gains were exceptional, due to the AMD Opteron processors’ fast CPU-to-memory throughput and the outstanding multithreading of Solaris 10. “With Linux, if you have too many concurrent threads, it can eventually start to slow down,” says Leeds, “With Solaris, the performance is linear.”

Accompanying Gracenote’s performance gains were a slew of other benefits inherent in Sun’s robust, datacenter-oriented blade systems:

• Highly reliable, redundant infrastructure
• Flexible, scalable architecture
• Easy serviceability
• Potential space savings in the datacenter
• Low acquisition costs
• Low expenses for power and cooling

Such benefits accrue from Sun’s blade server design philosophy. “We’ve focused our blade architecture on the needs of multicore processors and demanding enterprise applications such as virtualization,” says Michael McNerney, director of the blade server product line at Sun. “This means a robust architecture with up to double the memory and I/O capacity of competing blades and rack-mounts, as well as hot swappable, redundant, and modular components to enhance reliability, availability, and serviceability.”

Indeed, Leeds appreciated the redundancy of Sun Blade systems when a co-location facility had to replace the breakers on two of four circuits coming into the blade server chassis. When the power was cut, alarms went off, but the chassis remained up and running. “That’s a good example of robust design, as are the nine fans mounted in the back. If one fails, you can pop it out and replace it,” Leeds says. “In fact, you can even pop out a full blade, and when you put it back the system recognizes it as if nothing happened.”

If a server were to fail, Leeds has confidence in Sun’s service team. “We buy four-hour support contracts for all our production gear,” he says. “The system usually knows when a part fails, so we just open a ticket at the co-location facility and a Sun technician shows up with the part and replaces it.”

Gracenote uses two blade configurations for its cell-phone application, one with 8GB of memory and one with 32GB. Leeds likes knowing that the chassis is flexible enough to function smoothly either way. “We could even go to 64GB of memory if that worked for us,” he says.

Meanwhile, the processing density, modularity, and energy efficiency of Sun’s blade servers lower Gracenote’s costs in several ways:

Real estate savings: Given Gracenote’s needs and the specific servers and technology being replaced, Sun’s blade servers presently require approximately 25 percent less floor space at Gracenote’s co-location facilities than before.

Low capital expenses: Gracenote found that acquisition costs were less than those of an equivalent, non-blade infrastructure.

Low operating expenses: Thanks to energy-efficient AMD Opteron processors and shared power and cooling, among other features, Sun’s blades keep Gracenote’s power and cooling costs low, especially when compared to an equivalent infrastructure. Leeds further worked to keep energy usage down by making selected use of AMD Opteron High Efficiency (HE) processors, which are designed to offer industry-leading performance-per-watt.

For Gracenote, all of that adds up to a compelling bottom line. “Sun Blade systems with AMD Opteron processors are extremely reliable, with exceptional price/performance characteristics,” says Leeds. “Working with Sun has allowed us to build a high-quality, redundant infrastructure at an affordable cost. Therefore we can keep the price we charge our customers down, and that’s a real win for Gracenote.”

A Bladed Future
Leeds plans to continue deploying Sun Blade systems featuring the high processing and memory densities made possible by Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors. He is even considering a move to an all-blade environment over time.

“We’re very sold on Sun Blades,” he says. “As the co-location facilities build out more infrastructure that can handle the high power densities required by blade chasses, we anticipate that our potential savings in space and power efficiency will more than cost-justify the move.”

Tom Farre is a freelance journalist with more than 20 years of experience covering the computer industry.

* HyperTransport is a licensed trademark of the HyperTransport Technology Consortium.