Movie Theater Company

Market Segment: Entertainment

Introduction

The Company is the largest theatrical exhibition company in the world in terms of revenues and one of the largest motion picture exhibitors in the United States in terms of the number of theater screens operated. The Company runs more than 250 theaters with 2,800 screens in 23 states. As an industry leader in the development and operation of multi-screen cinemas, the company was experiencing double digit growth each year.

Problem/Opportunity

The Company was in the process of architecting and planning for the migration of their Data Warehouse from Oracle to SQL Server at the time of this engagement. With their super users very comfortable and competent with the Microsoft Tool Set, they had made a conscious decision to create a UDM project that would store their data in a SQL Server Engine rather than an Oracle engine. The scope of this project was to:

Design and architect a highly available SQL infrastructure environment with recommendations on hardware, options on versions of SQL Server and options for scaling the environment based on future growth numbers provided by the Company.
The environment needed to be designed to include an overall infrastructure to include the SQL Server relational data warehouse, Analysis Services and Reporting Services.

Solution/Capabilities

The goal of the new design architecture was to improve data flow efficiency, and to streamline data access with a scalable and highly available data warehouse solution. Scalability Experts (SE) provided details on the recommended configuration and hardware specifications for servers required to support the new design based on estimated uplifts in workloads and data volumes needed. SE made specific recommendations for the type of 64 bit servers due to the need for bigger Virtual Address Space (VAS) and greater processor scalability. Storage recommendations were also provided which included (but not limited to) the following – RAID design driven first by business criticality requirements and tolerance for failure, and secondly by implementation costs. Granular details on disk and file layout considerations were also provided to ensure both performance and availability.

Server platforms that were recommended in this study were chosen with HADR capabilities in mind. The chosen server platform had support for Microsoft cluster services for failover clustering deployment, if paired with the appropriate storage solution. Database mirroring is also fully supported and the decision on which mode of DB mirroring to employ was left on the Company’s business criticality ratings and cost thresholds. Based on HA requirements and restrictions that were provided by the Company, SE provided two options to fulfill their high availability requirements – 2-node Failover cluster and Database Mirroring. The recommended platforms and configurations were designed to ensure that the Company’s future growth would not require a re-design of its system.

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