Major League Baseball
The MLBlogs Network, the official blog site of MLB.com featuring unofficial commentary and opinions, is the go-to site for everything baseball. Previously a paid service, MLB Advanced Media (MLBAM) wanted to expand its membership by redesigning the site and making it free for the 2008 MLB season.
In order to prepare for Opening Day, MLBAM needed to update its blog publishing software to add features and functionality that would support increased membership and site traffic. Additionally, MLBAM wanted to create a new look and feel with a simple interface for creating, updating, and viewing content created by baseball players and fans in order to “throw out” the first blog by Opening Day.
The TypePad hosted blogging service from Six Apart Ltd., which powered the previous blog site, offered an extremely easy-to-use interface. Having had a great experience with Six Apart’s support and engineering teams, MLBAM’s CTO, Joe Choti, and Six Apart began collaborating on upgrading its existing publishing platform.
Field of Dreams
Choti decided to use Six Apart’s social media platform, Movable Type, to build the blog network because of its strong content management capabilities and social networking features. Movable Type supports large blog installations and communities with thousands of users, and offers highly customizable features. The platform’s intuitive content management system offered various templating features that enabled MLB.com to offer a free blog to any baseball fan who wanted to share his or her thoughts and experiences about baseball with players and other fans. In starting up their blogs, fans of any MLB team could choose from among three blog designs based on the team of their choice. They could immediately begin blogging, or take a minute to fill out their profile and upload a profile photo.
Choti and MLB Advanced Media also engaged Six Apart Services (SAS) to provide the design and architecture of the new site. Six Apart Services designs, develops, and customizes Websites, blogs and database applications for some of the leading media companies and Fortune 500 corporations in the United States.
As Opening Day loomed, SAS built and customized a community site that would host thousands of baseball fans and players in an ongoing conversation about all things baseball. With the site design nearing completion, Six Apart recommended that MLB Advanced Media also partner with a complex managed hosting provider that could guarantee a highly available and scalable architecture in a very short time frame.
The King of Swing
Logicworks, a leading provider of high-availability hosting solutions to support business-critical applications and content based in New York City, was selected to provide a VMware-supported virtualization platform and its Managed Database Services to support the MLBlog Network for Opening Day. Having partnered with Logicworks in the past, both Six Apart and Apperceptive were confident that Logicworks could effectively build out an architecture that would support MLBAM’s initiatives quickly.
“When it comes to delivering quality complex solutions quickly, Logicworks is our partner of choice,” said David Jacobs, VP of Six Apart Services. “Logicworks’ team of expert engineers are well positioned to recommend and implement reliable and scalable architectures, and provide unmatched support.”
With a little less than a month until Opening Day, Logicworks team of database engineers began working around the clock to create a high-availability architecture that could scale and deliver a 100% uptime service level agreement (SLA) for the database layer. Logicworks’ Managed Database Service included a redundant database architecture to provide the MLBlog Network end-to-end database monitoring, fulfillment of backups, management of fail-over and fail-back processes, providing an overall level of risk mitigation. The database is comprised of two physical servers, a primary or master that records all data while transactions are shipped to the secondary or slave database. In the event that the primary goes down, Logicworks conducts failover to the slave database. These database-related tasks are all a part of Logicworks’ Managed Database Service.
Logicworks recommended and implemented a highly-available VMware Virtual Infrastructure cluster, comprised of three VMware ESX servers and twelve Linux virtual machines. The RedHat Linux virtual machines run the web and various application servers required by Movable Type. (The aforementioned database layer exists on its own and is not virtualized.) Logicworks is taking full advantage of the flexibility provided by a VMware virtualized environment, providing the MLBlog Network with the ability to optimize virtual machine resource allocations for CPU, memory, disk and network bandwidth. These rapid redundancy and failover capabilities ensure a true high-availability configuration.
For the storage of MLBlog Networks’ data, Logicworks architected an always available DRBD (Distributed Replicated Block Device) storage cluster. DRBD is a proven, highly resilient, high-performance storage solution that provides high-availability with automatic failover in a “shared-nothing” configuration which is critical for revenue-generating and brand-building applications that cannot withstand any downtime. DRBD solutions require a pair of servers, with the primary server synchronously replicating all data to an identical block device on the second server using a dedicated network connection. In the event the primary server fails, the secondary server remounts the block device, and seamlessly presents its storage - ensuring high-availability at all times for MLBlogs.com data.
Batter Up
With the virtualization and database architecture in place and the design and implementation of the new MLBlogs.com complete, MLBAM was ready to launch the new site on Opening Day.
“Opening Day was a huge success and traffic tripled from last year,” said Joe Choti. “We were thrilled with the entire process—from design, platform implementation, to database management—everything was seamless. Together, Six Apart, Movable Type, and Logicworks helped us achieve all of our goals.”
"Six Apart has collaborated with Logicworks on a number of projects and the level of professionalism and experience that both teams bring is unparalleled," said Marissa Levinson, VP of Movable Type, Six Apart. "The MLBlogs.com site was a success and we look forward to continuing our collaboration to provide fully featured end-to-end social networking sites."
For more information check out the eWeek Headline News article; http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Database/Managed-Database-Service-a-Home-Run-for-Major-League-Baseball/
