YACAST Rocks Around the Clock with LifeKeeper

SteelEye's LifeKeeper provides continuous protection for applications and data to reduce planned downtime to less than 55 minutes per year

London, UK - 23 August 2006 - International music and advertising monitoring company YACAST, has selected SteelEye Technology's LifeKeeper to continuously protect its customer centric IT and web applications in order to provide increased performance and guaranteed service levels of its media monitoring reports. LifeKeeper ensures the information reports, which are updated in real time, are available on an uninterrupted basis via a secure business-to-business internet site, WAP or PDA.

YACAST employs sophisticated technology to analyse and generate complex reports about music and advertising content from hundreds of media channels across TV and radio in every country. Its services reflect the growing importance of having an accurate understanding of audience behaviour and an increasing commercial awareness of the value of airtime.

For companies like YACAST, acceptable system downtime is not measured in hours or days, because business success and customer loyalty are measured in minutes and seconds. For YACAST downtime has simply become an unaffordable luxury.

Xavier Fabre, Project Manager of YACAST, said, "To a large extent we can only exist and be successful because there are hundreds of channels to monitor. The problem with monitoring all of these simultaneously is that, if something major happens to our database and we start missing information, there is no way of catching up. Immediately, the quality of the information we provide to our clients starts to degrade and lose accuracy, threatening the value we bring."

In a project that took less than six weeks, YACAST's IT team undertook to update its database to Oracle 10g running on Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 and migrate from its ageing Compaq Alpha servers to new 64 bit Opteron Dual Core servers. Following five weeks of testing and optimisation working with SteelEye's Competence Centre and certified distribution partner in France, NON STOP Systems, a two-node LifeKeeper cluster was implemented to protect the entire solution.

By using commodity servers running SteelEye's high availability and data replication clustering solutions, YACAST determined that it could achieve between 99.99% and 99.999% uptime for business critical applications at a fraction of the cost of its previous system. To put this into perspective, it meant that YACAST could plan on between just 8 and 55 minutes of downtime for an entire year, for both planned and unplanned outages. This is because LifeKeeper enables continuous operation during planned downtime for maintenance or upgrades as well as in the event of a system failure or if an application ceases to respond.

YACAST's Xavier Fabre said, "Over the course of a year, an hour's downtime - especially if it's carefully scheduled - wouldn't cause significant inaccuracy in our statistics. The fact that any downtime we experienced would be most likely scheduled rather than random would mean we had won most of the battle already; it is unexpected outages that could really hurt us."

SteelEye's LifeKeeper for Linux provides YACAST with the all-important active-active configuration that ensures uptime should one of its applications begin to fail. LifeKeeper maintains high availability of clustered Linux systems by monitoring system and application health, maintaining client connectivity and providing uninterrupted data access regardless of where clients reside. In the case of a failure, LifeKeeper allows applications to failover to other active servers in the cluster. This helps LifeKeeper minimize the risk of a single point of failure and allows YACAST's Linux systems to meet stringent availability requirements by creating a fault resilient environment.

Xavier Fabre of YACAST, sums up the benefits: "The bottom line for us is that, while the database migration itself was a complex process, it was an experience we had to go through because our existing database server had reached saturation point. By simultaneously deploying SteelEye's LifeKeeper solution on low-cost Intel-based servers, we were able to triple the performance of the database while at the same time we actually improved the uptime of our applications because LifeKeeper enables maintenance to take place without downtime."

Notes to the editor:

Full case study available.

YACAST system:
SteelEye LifeKeeper for Linux is protecting YACAST's Oracle 10g database and file server, which is running on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 (SLES9) and new AMD 64 bit Opteron Dual Core servers.

The project was finished in less than six weeks.

SteelEye's Competence Centre at NON STOP Systems, and ALGOS Networks conducted the installation.

About YACAST's information services

Using its advanced, proprietary applications, YACAST provides two primary information services via an interactive website to its customers:

• Advertcast: an ad monitoring service that provides quantitative and qualitative real time intelligence for media and advertising companies and control bodies. It measures press, radio and TV advertising budgets according to industries, advertisers, trademarks and products. In France alone, it monitors over 250 media channels. For any given campaign, Advertcast displays the broadcasting schedule in real time and calculates the corresponding investments. Results can then be interrogated via YACAST's secured and interactive internet site.
• Muzicast provides record companies, radio programmers and public bodies with a global picture of the music radio and TV market - charts, tracking of titles, analyses of programming strategies, rotation patterns and best selling tracks. It can provide reactive and interactive solutions which instantly address programming, promotion and marketing issues. The information is updated in real time and is available on a continuous basis via a secure business-to-business internet site, WAP or PDA.

About YACAST

Established since 2000, Yacast is the French leader of Music tracking and one of the leaders in ad tracking. Yacast specializes in Internet broadcasting and embedded multimedia solutions for mobile technologies.

In the coming months, YACAST will keep track of music and advertising data across Europe. So, comprehensive inventories of music and advertising materials broadcast by about 50 media companies in each country (representing over 80 % of the audience) will be available to professionals for consultation.

Thanks to this database, they will have access to a standardized tool to obtain detailed intelligence as well as consolidated market shares on a European basis.

In each country where it sets up, YACAST aims to become a major operator in business fields like online streaming and the delivery of services to radio and TV companies.

For more information, please visit www.YACAST.com

About LifeKeeper for Linux

SteelEye's LifeKeeper for Linux is a software application that ensures the continuous availability of applications by maintaining system uptime. LifeKeeper maintains the high availability of clustered Linux systems by monitoring system and application health, maintaining client connectivity and providing uninterrupted data access regardless of where clients reside - on the corporate Internet, intranet or extranet.

To enable automatic system and application recovery if the system goes down, LifeKeeper allows applications to failover to other servers in the cluster. This helps LifeKeeper minimize the risk of a single point of failure and allows Linux systems to meet the stringent availability requirements of mission-critical operations by creating a fault resilient environment.

http://www.steeleye.com/products/linux/

About SteelEye Technology

SteelEye is a leading provider of data and application availability management solutions for business continuity and disaster recovery. The SteelEye LifeKeeper family of application-focused data replication, high availability clustering and disaster recovery solutions are easy to deploy and operate, and enable enterprises of all sizes to ensure continuous availability of business-critical applications, servers and data. To complement its software solutions, SteelEye also provides a full range of high availability consulting and professional services to assist organizations with the assessment, design and implementation of solutions for ensuring High Availability within their environments. To learn more about SteelEye, visit www.steeleye.com.

About NON STOP

NON STOP Systems distributes and supports SteelEye's LifeKeeper products in France with its partners, resellers and integrators. Its expertise in Windows and Linux business-critical environments makes NON STOP Systems a favorable partner for all companies concerned about the continuous availability of their critical systems, data and applications.

SteelEye Technology, SteelEye and LifeKeeper are registered trademarks of SteelEye Technology, Inc. All other product or service names may be registered trademarks or trademarks, and are the property of their respective owners.