PeeVee Corporation was established in early 2006 as a venture company involved in two core businesses: operating its Internet video media Web site, PeeVee.TV; and providing a video streaming platform to its affiliates so the public can share videos over the Internet. Through these core businesses, the company has experienced rapid growth.

The PeeVee.TV service launched in April 2006 allows anyone to post their videos online with ease. Well-received for its ability to be incorporated into blogs and to allow related video content to be displayed together by category and tags, PeeVee.TV is currently utilized by four million users a month. PeeVee Corporation’s other core business, aimed at its affiliates, provides PeeVee.TV technologies and video content in a video-sharing platform that enables creation of mash-ups of video content submitted by general users whom PeeVee’s affiliates are targeting.

The Challenge: Resolving Performance Degradation from Increased Traffic

The PeeVee.TV system is entirely configured on open-source software such as Apache, Tomcat, MySQL and Java. Initially, a single server was used to operate all systems, but in October 2006, Excite Japan Co., Ltd., adopted the PeeVee.TV service as the platform for its video-sharing service, Dogalog. PeeVee took this opportunity to expand its infrastructure to multiple Web and video streaming servers.

PeeVee Corporation’s director and CTO, Kazuo Nukazuka, recalled, “We wanted to implement a load balancer but due to cost issues, we ended up sharing the load using a DNS round robin method to distribute user requests to the Web server sequentially. This worked adequately at the time, but when we began providing our service to Excite, traffic volume increased considerably and problems with performance began to occur.”

PeeVee continued to operate the system while carrying out day-to-day tuning; however, loads were being concentrated on specific servers, which prevented the company from achieving the performance it had hoped for. “Improving performance was still our priority,” Nukazuka explained. In order to meet these changing business needs, PeeVee considered implementing a commercial load balancer with the aim of enhancing the performance of Web application streaming.

Implementing a Citrix Application Delivery Infrastructure Solution

Upon the launch of the Excite-oriented service, the load on PeeVee’s servers increased as more and more Excite blog users posted their videos. With the implementation of Citrix® NetScaler®, completed at the end of 2006, the company has been able to operate its service totally free of any problems. Nukazuka described the company’s reasons for selecting NetScaler: “At the time, we were only aware of one company’s product, but after being introduced to NetScaler and learning that it was not only capable of load sharing, but also equipped with caching, remote access and security functions covering layer 4 to layer 7, our interest was piqued. My area of expertise originally lies in application development and I am not well versed in network configuration, so I thought that the ideal product should be easy to use.”

PeeVee’s network environment consists of a firewall at the entrance to the Internet, behind which two NetScaler appliances are set up in a back-up configuration to distribute requests to multiple Web and video streaming servers. NetScaler determines the URL and request header information using layer 7 functionality to allocate the request to the optimal server. For instance, dynamic content processing is distributed to the high-spec servers, while static content is sent to the other servers.

Modifying Settings Quickly and Flexibly without System Downtime

Outlining the benefits of implementing NetScaler, Nukazuka said, “Our services require program and server configurations that can be flexibly adapted to suit the changing needs of our business. The greatest benefit of NetScaler is that it allows us to modify system settings without system downtime. We initially thought that any product would be fine as long as it enabled load sharing, but upon actually launching our service, we found that it was necessary to allow both still and moving content, such as mash-ups, to coexist. The ability to allocate access pathways for both still and moving content with ease was another facet of NetScaler that appealed to us.”

The company also values the ability of NetScaler to automatically discriminate between and control access by legitimate users and hackers such as Web crawlers and blackhats.

Handling Traffic Spikes with Ease

“The beauty of NetScaler lies in its ability to deliver solutions for easily dealing with a myriad of issues. On our site, especially, it is difficult to predict traffic volume, so when a problem does occur we need a highly flexible and user-friendly framework capable of immediate response. The NetScaler control screen is easy to navigate and makes system configuration and settings changes a breeze,” Nukazuka explained.

“Thanks to NetScaler, we won’t need to change our user access portal for some time. Whenever an article covering our services appears in the media, we experience a spike in access requests, but NetScaler is capable of distributing even this heavy traffic entirely without a hitch.”

Future Plans

PeeVee Corporation is now planning to roll out a mobile phone-oriented service, for which it will call upon NetScaler capabilities to handle session administration. The commencement of the mobile service will be accompanied by the addition of several more servers, and NetScaler will also provide effective solutions for their management.

The company is also eyeing the implementation of Citrix® AppCache™ caching functionality offered by NetScaler. “If we can leverage the caching function, it will be possible to use the cached data for video content instead of having to access the server every time, and this will enable us to enhance performance even further.” In addition, by directly collecting log data from NetScaler, PeeVee plans to set up a framework whereby it can gather statistical information and analyze it from a variety of aspects.

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