International Speedway Corporation (ISC) is a leading promoter of NASCAR and other motor sports. With the company experiencing 10-15% growth over several years, it decided to leave its third-party vendor hosted systems and build its own data center, engaging an IT vendor to remotely manage its mission-critical systems that include a ticketing system, ERP system and 54 interactive web sites.

“We didn’t have an enormous budget to deal with, so we had to be really selective,” notes Craig Neeb, chief information officer at ISC. “I didn’t want to be a small fish in a big pond. I had to feel that the company was really interested in our business and had an organizational structure that could align well with our business goals and objectives.”

After consulting with Savvis, Kanbay and Sun, ISC chose Sun Remote Operations Management, an offering from Sun Managed Services.

Sun personnel worked with ISC to restructure its architecture and set up the new data center. Its mission-critical systems include a mix of old and new technologies that run on the Solaris 10 Operating System. The ticketing system, which includes an application tier of three Sun Fire T2000 servers running 18 virtual environments and a clustered database tier of two Sun Fire V490 servers and two Sun Fire T2000 servers, makes use of Solaris Cluster 3.2 software, Oracle Real Application Clusters and Oracle Database 10g. To speed performance, the ticketing system interoperates with a multi-tiered storage area network (SAN) built with Sun Storage Archive Manager software 4.6, two Sun StorageTek 6540 arrays and one Sun StorEdge 6130 array. The ERP system runs on two clustered Sun Fire V490 servers along with Oracle PeopleSoft Enterprise applications and Oracle Database 10g. The company’s web sites, which connect to the ticketing system and SAN, run in multiple virtual and physical environments built with with 4 Microsoft Windows servers, driven by both Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle 10g databases.

With Sun systems and services in place, Neeb says Sun Managed Services operates as an extension of the ISC team. "I get a report every day of what is going on in our environment," he said. "We’ve reduced our administrative costs for third-party services, and Sun assists us in addressing our future needs as well.”

He also notes that the redesigned architecture supports varying levels of system traffic and service-levels for performance and availability are better than ever.

“Last year was our best year for service levels,” says Neeb. “We hit 99.9%. Sun Managed Services exceeded our expectations. They are always two steps ahead of us. There have been many times where Sun personnel found a problem before it affected the end user’s experience. Sun then resolved it and let us know what happened. That’s my dream world right there. That’s what I was looking for.”

More Information

Customer Snapshot: International Speedway Corporation (ISC)

Sun Remote Operations Management Services

Sun Fire T2000 Server

Sun StorageTek 6540 Array

Solaris 10 Operating System

Solaris Cluster 3.2

Sun StorageTek Storage Archive Manager 4.6 Software

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