Digiplug is Building a Digital Supply Chain Infrastructure Thanks To Brocade NetIron MLX and FastIron SuperX

Brocade® (NASDAQ:BRCD) today announced that Digiplug, a leading provider of end-to-end digital distribution solutions for Rights Holders and Digital Content Retailers worldwide, has completed a project to digitize customer assets and build a new high performance, high speed data center using Brocade’s NetIron MLX routers and FastIron SuperX switches.

With clients including Universal, Sony and Warner Digiplug is at the forefront of an online and mobile revolution. The boom in digital services has drastically changed the way entertainment content is funded, manufactured, marketed, distributed, monetized and consumed. For the media and entertainment industry, recorded music was the first to go digital, but now the whole industry is focused on digitization of its content.

The existing twin data centres could not cope with the sudden traffic growth. With clients like the Universal Music Group International relying on the firm to distribute content across the globe, Digiplug needed to invest in a new, highly available and scalable network, with reliable interconnect speeds.

In order to choose the new infrastructure, Digiplug – through local channel reseller, BSO - compared vendors on two levels: projected total cost of ownership and performance/port density capacity. The winner of the comparison was Brocade on price, rack space and energy consumption. BSO supported Digiplug’s decision to select Brocade.

In addition, to cope with the huge amount of data Digiplug needed to securely interconnect between its two Data Centers and its headquarters in central Paris via a dedicated Fibre link; redundancy was also very important so the network is mirrored in each data center. Owing to the value of musical masters sent by the rightholders, Digiplug also requested security enforcement and added several security checkpoints, between each layer. Digiplug deployed two Brocade NetIron MLX 4 routers in the main data center core to manage the bandwidth with BGP and AS (Autonomous System) and one Brocade NetIron MLX 4 router in the backup data center. These routers had to be able to manage the BGP configuration and the different modes of accessing Digiplug’s network; one transparent access for its customers through private networks and the Internet.

Digiplug also implemented four Brocade FastIron SuperX switches in the main data center and two Brocade FastIron SuperX switches in the secondary data center. The chassis-based architecture of these solutions allows future scalability, through addition of cards and ports. This was critical for Digiplug, whose server numbers are growing quickly due to data growth.

Three Brocade FastIron Edge X 448 Premium Series were installed in the main data center, with another three. The IPv6-capable FastIron Edge X Series switches enable network managers to future proof the network to support IPv6. The high performance of IPv6-ready platforms, security, convergence, and complete IPv4/IPv6 visibility using embedded sFlow provides a robust edge-to-core IPv6 solution.

The interconnectivity between these routers and switches is ensured through optical fibre. Between the two data centers, the interconnectivity uses Dark Fiber, and to get all benefits from it, the company has lambdas in Gbps and 1 lambda in 10 Gbps. Digiplug uses DWDM (Dense wavelength Data Multiplexing) protocol for 10 Gbps, an unusual configuration which was a real challenge for the BSO and Digiplug team to implement. However Digiplug has already seen the results and performances of its new infrastructure. The company needed 10 Gbps, and while they did some real test in use, they managed to achieve up to 9 or 8 Gbps, by putting 10 machines on each side to test the link. They observed near-perfect performance with very little latency.

The company also tested the Brocade FastIron SuperX extensively. Two of these are used to connect the different machines to the storage cluster (300 Tb), which is used at 60 percent capacity. The IT team demonstrated the high performance capabilities of the Brocade solutions by attached 50 servers concurrently, and they still didn’t manage to reach the limitation of the Brocade products. This shows very high performance from Brocade products, and the whole company was delighted in choosing Brocade.

Digiplug’s management has also been impressed by the deployment. The solution cost was half that of competitors’ products and has provided them greater performance, and moreover they do not experience the same volume of network problems.

Julien Andrieux, IT Manager at Digiplug, comments: "Brocade had a very reliable team and BSO has always found the best tailored solution for us, even if the transformation of our architecture has been very important. The implementation of this new infrastructure has been made in a very transparent way, and allows us to consider our future needs of evolution with a peaceful mind.”

Thanks to the collaboration with BSO and Brocade teams, Digiplug managed to ensure a transparent implementation, autonomy of management of the new infrastructure, so as competences transfers. BSO actually manages the facilities of Digiplug LAN and WAN platform, and maintains it in operational conditions.

In the future, Digiplug anticipates that their customers will send more and more videos (video-clips and concerts), so they will need a continuous evolution of the platform. The Brocade infrastructure installed will grow with their needs, ensuring the performance, scalability and ease of management that they require.

About Brocade

Brocade® (Nasdaq: BRCD) develops extraordinary networking solutions that enable today’s complex, data-intensive businesses to optimize information connectivity and maximize the business value of their data. For more information, visit www.brocade.com

About Digiplug

Digiplug provides SaaS solutions for the production, management and distribution of multimedia (image, audio, video) content. Today, Digiplug is a top partner for music labels. Its software solutions enable the production and global distribution of digital content for 3 of the 4 music majors: Universal Music since 2001, Warner Music and Sony Music Entertainment since 2003. Every day, Digiplug distributes thousands of products on behalf of music major in more than 50 countries and to some 900 distribution platforms. Digiplug also has solutions for digital content distributors to provide them the ability to aggregate and monetize digital products and solutions to produce sales and financial reports. In March 2007, Digiplug has been acquired by Accenture Group.

For more information, visit: http://www.digiplug.com/

About BSO Networks

Founded in 2004, BSO Network Solutions is the leading Next Generation Operator providing Network services, Hosting and Integration. With its rapid growth, BSO Network Solutions is already present in more than 12 countries (France, UK, The Netherlands, Germany, Belgium, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, USA, Brazil, Canada and Hong Kong) and has offices in Paris, London and Hong Kong. BSO Network Solutions administers and operates its own Nx10Gbit/s network which has been crafted to be compatible with future 100Gbit/s interfaces. Thanks to a range of very high value-added services and to comprehensive facilities management and validation offerings, BSO Network Solutions provides its customers with guidance and assistance from the most upstream phases of their projects, in terms of advice and expertise, to the most downstream, including the daily administration, upgrading and adaptation of their infrastructure. All its services are covered by extremely robust Service Level Agreements (SLA) tailor-made to match each problem addressed. More info: www.bsonetwork.com

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