Kiosk-based challenger to Blockbuster touts use of smart network technologies
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.
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.”
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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 24×7 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.”
Web services for future-proofing
In addition to efficient data centers, each kiosk is also built for optimal efficiency and flexibility. For example, DVDPlay treats each hardware kiosk as a separate Web service. When it built the original software for communicating with the kiosks, sending commands to display and dispense titles, the company abstracted out the hardware, making dealing with multiple hardware types and software revisions far easier.
“It was very difficult for our software developers to understand that in one machine you had to turn a carousel with discs, while another machine had a 4-dimensional robotic arm that’s moving and gripping,”Horstmann explains. “We encapsulated the entire hardware as a service, so that our Java software communicates only with the service, not the hardware,” he says. “The software requests that a particular title be dispensed, and the service just responds and says, yes, it’s done or I had a problem doing that because the title wasn’t there or whatever.”
The Web services architecture enables the firm to use the same software across as many as four different hardware platforms. It also enables the company to roll out new kiosks with improved features much more quickly. “When the machine capacity went up from 100 to 500 disks, in the software, it required changing just one parameter. We were able to make that transition within days, including testing, while we know that other kiosk manufacturers took a year to redesign.”
Network flexibility
Another key hurdle DVDPlay has overcome is the variety of network technology — ranging from DSL to wireless to plain old telephone lines — it must use within each retail site. In the end, the company built its software so that each kiosk detects the available bandwidth and adjusts its services to match.
“For sites with high bandwidth, we’ll download more images and trailers down to the kiosk, but if there is only a slow connection, the kiosk just needs to rent you a disk,” Horstmann says. “Maybe it will show you a static picture of the particular movie vs. a whole trailer.”
He says the system has proven itself many times over, especially now that many retail sites are implementing wireless. “When the system was designed [back in 2000], wireless wasn’t really an option,” he says. “And while other systems struggle because wireless is sometimes really good and sometimes really bad, our system just degrades very gracefully.”
Cummings is a freelance writer in North Andover, Mass. She can be reached at jocummings@comcast.net.
