Since it was first founded in 2005, Ringleader Digital (RLD) has focused on being the world’s premier ad serving solution provider, delivering the online equivalent of ad serving technology and functionality to the mobile and new media markets. In 2007, Ringleader launched RLD Spark Server™, the industry’s first 3rd party mobile ad server. The RLD platform is designed to be open, interoperable, and leverage the ad serving tools and networks that publishers, ad agencies, and marketing analytics companies already use. RLD products decrease costs and boost revenue and subscriber retention. The licensable RLD solutions identify, track, and target mobile and new media users in real time, turning user information into data that Ringleader customers can act on right away.

Two Challenges: Spikes and Bottlenecks

Ad serving to mobile phones presents two challenges. The first involved designing a backend infrastructure that could handle a sustained high volume of traffic with spikes of anywhere from two to twenty times normal volume.

The Ringleader Digital infrastructure performs ad serving to mobile devices from Microsoft IIS web servers and RLD’s ad serving platform, using MS SQL Enterprise servers for both the ad serving database and the RLD proprietary Media Stamp profile database. The IIS servers run on Windows 2003 R2 64 Bit Standard Edition, while the RLD ad servers run on Centos Release 4.8. The MS SQL Enterprise Edition database servers are clustered as active/passive pairs; the Web servers are pooled into load-balanced virtual server pools.

The second ad serving challenge stemmed from the lack of a standard cookie in the vast field of mobile devices. Internet advertising relies on cookies as a way to count unique ad impressions and click-throughs, as well as manage ad campaigns via frequency capping and other targeting criteria. While cookies are ubiquitous among desktop/laptop browsers, they are far from standardized and very often not even present in mobile devices.

Ringleader’s RLD platform provides the ability to recognize unique users on mobile devices via its proprietary Media Stamp technology. Media Stamp can recognize unique profiles of users and use this to manage and track advertising campaigns on mobile phones. Media Stamp relies on a Microsoft SQL Enterprise database for storage and retrieval of unique user profiles and employs a proprietary profile identification algorithm based on a cascading series of unique discriminators and the use of statistical methods for comparing the similarity and diversity of data sets.

However, the increasing traffic levels and volume of database transactions experienced by Ringleader Digital starting early in 2009 resulted in an I/O through-put bottleneck between their Media Stamp Web servers and SQL Server database. The performance characteristics of the backend physical data storage became more and more critical to RLD’s ability to scale its ad serving capabilities to meet the growing demands of its customer base. 

The Solution: The World’s Fastest Storage^®

Ringleader Digital’s engineering and IT teams turned their attention to three possible solutions:

• Avoiding SAN bottlenecks via distributed in-memory databases, hashes, and associative hard disk drive arrays with gigabit Ethernet and/or Infiniband interconnects
• More esoteric longer-term solutions featuring GPU’s, FPGA’s, and Systolic processors
• Improving SAN performance utilizing solid state storage.

Each option was evaluated; the RLD teams looked specifically at Sun high performance 15,000 RPM SAS hard disk drive arrays. But RLD determined that solid state storage with its promise of ultra low latency and ultra high IOPS (input/outputs per second) offered an immediate solution to the performance challenge. After investigating the very few truly enterprise solid state disk (SSD) alternatives, RLD chose RamSan^® products from Texas Memory Systems (TMS) because the RamSan^® presented a highly robust and capable solution at a reasonable cost per gigabyte. Presley Acuna, RLD Director – Technology, explained, “Of all the SSD arrays on the market today, none could match the performance, capacity, or high availability features of the RamSan^® product line. We liked its integrated architecture and judicious use of both Flash and RAM, its ability to organize volumes into LUNs (Logical Storage Units) using LUN masking, and its ability to analyze performance using built-in graphing and metrics.”

To facilitate the RamSan^® acquisition process, the TMS sales team recommended MCE, a long-time TMS partner. MCE provides IT infrastructure solutions to enterprises of all sizes by offering a comprehensive portfolio of services and products, including SSD systems from TMS. MCE quickly furnished the RamSan^® solution to RLD with unmatched pricing and service.  

The Result: Actionable Data, Right Away

RLD deployed one RamSan-500 SSD system with two terabytes of Flash storage and two Fibre Channel dual-ported controllers. They moved both the Ad Serving and Media Stamp profile databases onto the SSD.

The RamSan-500 cached Flash design utilizes the fastest RAM memory to create a large, performance-boosting cache for the high capacity, lower cost Flash-based storage. Available in one or two terabyte capacities in a 4U rack mount chassis, the RamSan-500 delivers 100,000 IOPS and two gigabytes per second of sustained random read or write bandwidth and yet only consumes 250 Watts of power. The system can be SAN or NAS-attached with up to eight 4-gigabits per second Fibre Channel ports. Multiple RamSan-500s can be combined to deliver additional high-performance capacity.

The RamSan-500 provided an immediate order of magnitude leap in performance for RLD’s databases compared to their prior hard disk-based SAN.  Most notably, the I/O bottleneck between the Ad Serving and Media Stamp profile databases and the IIS Web servers has disappeared. Today RLD’s technology stack enjoys ultra low latency data access with minimal wait states and high, sustainable transaction rates. 

The resulting database performance increase allowed RLD to focus engineering resources on other critical areas. The RamSan-500 allows RLD to deploy new versions of products in the market place without interrupting existing live customers. RLD can now “hot-swap” production users of datasets in a timely manner that would be un-achievable previously due to the loss of production performance which occurred with the prior SAN and heavy additional database workloads. Additionally, the 1TB capacity of the RamSan-500 combined with its performance allowed more flexibility for volumes, removing the strict layouts of volumes required for reasonable performance on a disk-based SAN solution.

RLD’s Presley Acuna notes, “ The TMS RamSan^® product line is a solidly engineered, stable, and high performing premium solution for enterprises needing ultra fast, large capacity storage coupled with high reliability, flexibility, and a rich suite of metrics and usability features.”

Acuna also notes another benefit of choosing Texas Memory Systems; “The TMS Technical Support team has been extremely responsive and supportive in the time RLD has owned a RamSan^®.” But he adds, “However, it should be said that, other than during the initial installation and implementation of the array, we have had minimal reason to call upon the support team. The product is extremely reliable and performing as advertised, although we have yet to really push the hardware to its limits.”

Asked if Ringleader has any plans to scale up their RamSan^® deployment in the future, Presley Acuna admits; “Our current disk space utilization on the RamSan^® hovers around 3% of total available space. It will take RLD some time to fill that space, but on the presumption that we will get to a point of needing to increase the volume of available high performance database storage, the answer is most likely, yes.” The events that might trigger the need for another RamSan^® could be any of several:  diversification to multiple data centers, evolution to distributed databases, re-architecting of ad serving applications, saturation of available disk space, network saturation of links between databases and servers, etc.

In the meantime, Ringleader Digital is focusing on what they do best, enabling immediate access to the actionable data their customers need, thanks in part to the RamSan-500 from Texas Memory Systems.