Integrator Supports Interactive TV With Networked Storage Solution

Anyone who used text messaging to vote for Clay or Ruben on "American Idol" knows reality shows are changing the way we watch television. These shows not only spark our interest, but many enable audience interaction and allow viewers to determine the outcome. This is the business Mobliss is in. Mobliss is a Seattle-based mobile media and infrastructure company that deploys entertainment and information services via wireless networks. The company's main offering is providing customers with transaction processing services that facilitate applications such as text message voting. Mobliss needed a storage array that could accommodate the massive surge of data that is transmitted during a text message voting procedure. The company worked with storage systems integrator OptiStor Technologies (Bellevue, WA) to design the solution. "Mobliss was processing several thousand text messaging transactions per second," says Mike McLean, account executive for OptiStor. "They needed a storage array with a lot of horsepower on the front end to be able to do a lot of reads and writes for their Linux cluster."

OptiStor selected a system consisting of a CLARiiON CX200 by EMC (Hopkinton, MA) and EMC Navisphere and Access Logix management software. With a cached performance of 200 MB per second and 40,000 I/Os (inputs/outputs) per second, the CX200 can hold a tremendous amount of data in cache and write it to disk when the system is idle. This functionality allows Mobliss to easily handle the heavy transaction loads it experiences. "Our CX200-based infrastructure supports the application logic and message queuing that processes the information and counts the votes in real time," says Hernan Alvarez, VP, infrastructure for Mobliss. In addition, EMC's Navisphere software allows Mobliss to manage, monitor, and configure the CX200 anywhere from a Web browser. Finally, EMC's Access Logix software enables multiple heterogenous hosts to connect to the CX200, enabling storage consolidation and the rapid deployment of new hosts. This provides Mobliss with the ability to grow its business quickly without downtime.