The more than 250,000 artists and other music professionals who rely on the web-based platform provided by Germany's SoundCloud to send, receive and distribute their music find the experience enhanced by the company's use of Sun servers, Open Storage and the Startup Essentials Program, which have enabled SoundCloud to achieve a monthly growth rate of 25%. SoundCloud availed itself of the services of Sun Startup Essentials to migrate its Web server stack to a solution that includes virtual servers and a hybrid storage pool built with Sun technologies.

The new architecture, which is hosted and managed by London-based EveryCity, quickly scales with growth, delivers the raw performance customers expect, and gives the current 12 SoundCloud employees the ability to focus on expanding the business. SoundCloud implemented an infrastructure that included a Sun Fire X4150 Server, Sun Storage 7210 Unified Storage System, MySQL Community Edition, Solaris OS, Solaris ZFS and the Sun Startup Essentials Program to manage its burgeoning growth opportunities, which had become too much for its legacy infrastructure based on commodity hardware running Linux and a database built with MySQL Community. All sound files were stored remotely using the S3 and EC2 services from Amazon Web Services.

As Sean Treadway, SoundCloud's chief architect explains things, "Before, it was difficult to scale our storage. I had to use some NFS tricks to distribute where files were stored, which cluttered our Web application so that it became more difficult to maintain. With our Sun solution, we have a good strategy for scaling different application bottlenecks and are no longer limited by a fixed storage-pool size. We can grow our storage pool as required without having to worry about where the space is or how it will work."

EveryCity's Commercial Director Duncan Malcolm explains the dynamics of this architecture, saying, “In terms of performance, we can use the advanced analytics on our Sun hybrid storage solution to see which IP nodes are processing higher transaction volumes than others, and then identify which Solaris Containers need to be moved around to distribute the load more evenly. When new servers are created, scripts automatically provision storage.”

To further enhance performance and availability, EveryCity also makes use of file system snapshots, clones, and data compression, which results in SoundCloud's ability to take advantage of the data compression technology in ZFS. Alasdair Lumsden, technical director at EveryCity, commented, “Unlike traditional compression that can slow things down, data compression in ZFS actually speeds things up.”

With the new implementation in place, SoundCloud processes customer requests with multiple instances of the Web application running within a cluster of Solaris Containers. Sound files are processed and sent to Amazon Web Services. Customer information, images, and artwork are tracked in a database that runs on a Sun Fire X4150 server. The database data itself is stored on eight 15k RPM SAS disks, striped and mirrored using the ZFS filesystem. Web application data and the Solaris Container boot images are stored on the Unified Storage System.

As a result of its new solution, the Web application driving SoundCloud maintains 99.99% availability and an Apdex score of 0.961.0 while supporting rapid growth. Over the last 11 months, the number of site users has grown from 20,000 to 250,000, an increase of about 25% each month. In addition, the site processes about three million dynamic page requests per day. “Today, our systems are in a different league altogether in terms of performance,” says Eric Wahlforss, founder and CTO of SoundCloud. “We haven’t had any unscheduled downtime, and our systems are handling more than 10 times the traffic.”

The next move under consideration at SoundCloud is the feasibility of moving from the outsourced solution with Amazon and S3 to a Sun storage solution.

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