Virtualization, Web services key to DVDPlay's success

Without virtualization, Web services and other IT tools, there would be no DVDPlay. So says Jens Horstmann, founding vice president and CTO at the nascent DVD rental company and a speaker at the recent Network World IT Roadmap event in Santa Clara, Calif.

DVDPlay uses a variety of cutting-edge IT technology, including virtualization, Web services and smart networking, to ensure that every DVD it rents for just $1.49 a pop turns a profit.

DVDPlay manages more than 1,200 DVD rental kiosks located in fast food and grocery stores across the country, including Burger King, Safeway and Albertsons. Shoppers looking to rent a movie to go along with their recent purchases simply walk up to a kiosk, choose a title and swipe their debit or credit card -- all as easily as using an ATM.

“It looks so simple; the DVD just pops out,” Horstmann says. “But to make this all work with new titles coming out every week, the payment clearing, remote administration and maintenance, it takes a lot of IT. IT is the enabler that allows us to get our price down vs. Blockbuster, whose [brick and mortar store] price is still $4.50 or so.”

Data center efficiency

It all starts at the data center, Horstmann says. DVDPlay has two of them in California and is getting ready to build a third in the Midwest. Each has about 60 servers, all running virtualization software, housed in just three racks. Each virtual server communicates with multiple kiosks, ensuring optimal utilization, and each is also mirrored to another virtual server, ensuring redundancy and 24x7 operation for DVDPlay kiosks.

Such redundancy is important, especially considering that the servers securely handle sensitive credit card transactions and are expected to register sales within seconds of a customer’s card swipe at the kiosk.

“If you think about 1,200 or more points of retail, with each kiosk communicating directly to the data center, if there’s something wrong with the data center, all of that grinds to a halt very quickly,” Horstmann says. “You need to have a lot of redundancy, and it basically ends up looking a lot like what the banks have done with ATMs.”

DVDPlay also seeks to be as efficient as possible when it comes to power and cooling within the data center. “We try to be economical and at the same time green, which is fashionable these days,” Horstmann says.

It also makes good business sense, given that power is the primary cost factor in DVDPlay data centers. “Power costs more than bandwidth these days,” he says. “We are extremely sensitive to that fact and would rather spend twice as much on a server if the server burns 30% less power.”

The company originally focused on high-power servers to handle its critical online transaction processing environment and data mining applications. “But the power issues have changed that a bit,” Horstmann says. “We’re looking to use more generic hardware, and instead focusing on making the system so robust that it can deal with essentially an entire database server going offline because it’s mirrored in two other places. The standard hardware uses less power, while virtualization works to make things more robust.”