Case Study: Gracenote achieves scalable, always-on metadata delivery for music, TV, and film with NetApp storage

Gracenote Relies on NetApp Storage as Agile Anchor in Shifting Sea of Metadata for Music, TV, and Film

Gracenote, a pioneer in digital media that supplies music and TV metadata to MP3 players, smartphones, cars, and cloud services, faced a major storage challenge as its global media database grew from millions of tracks to nearly a petabyte and query volume rose from 10 million to about 500 million daily. The company needed a reliable, scalable storage platform that could keep its 24/7 content syndication and complex data-warehouse operations running smoothly while adapting quickly to changing business demands.

Gracenote deployed NetApp FAS6000/3000 systems (including FAS6210 and FAS3210) with Data ONTAP, Flash Cache, and FlexClone to host Oracle and SQL Server systems, support hundreds of VMware servers, and enable Oracle Data Guard–backed failover across data centers. The solution delivered dependable 24/7 availability, met strict SLAs for hourly syndication to more than 250 million users and OEM partners, simplified support and scaling, and improved I/O efficiency and development/testing through space- and time-efficient cloning.

Gracenote

Matthew Leeds

Vice President of Operations