December 3, 2012
In 2009, mobile marketing and advertising technology provider Velti had a good (but challenging) problem on their hands. Their technology, which allows people to interact with their TV by voting, giving feedback, participating in contests, etc., had taken off. It had been adopted by nearly all of the TV broadcasters in the UK and three of the UK’s five mobile operators. As more customers began using their technology, Velti saw quick growth in (inherently spikey) traffic. Their 2003-era .NET, SQLServer platform was becoming a concern.
Because the team at Velti had been working with Erlang (what Riak is written in), in 2010 they brought in Erlang Solutions to help them architect their next generation platform. Riak was chosen for the database, and an early version of Multi-Data Center replication in Riak Enterprise was used to build two geographically separated sites to minimize potential catastrophic outages.
Velti’s new mGageTM platform is now running on 18 servers across two data centers (nine nodes in each data center), with each server running both Erlang applications as well as Riak. We’re pleased to pass along reports that the platform is redundant, queue behavior has significantly improved (especially for large queue populations), and that after Velti moved to Riak 1.2, they saw noticeable disk space utilization thanks to improvements in merge management.
Markus Kern, VP Technology at Velti summarizes, “We operate a 24/7 service for over 140 customers. We cannot afford a single minute of downtime. Riak gives us the ability to meet and exceed our requirements for scale, data, durability, and availability.” Woot!
For more details on Velti’s experience, see our case study Highly Available Mobile Platform With Riak.
