Case Study: Rhapsody International achieves 12–18 months' performance headroom with SanDisk ioDrive2

Rhapsody Tunes Performance Scaling

Rhapsody, the Seattle‑based digital music service with a catalog of over 16 million songs and more than one million paying subscribers, faced rapid growth from international expansion that stressed its nightly content ingestion, transactional databases and metadata search performance. The team needed to complete large I/O content-management jobs on time to meet publishing contracts, scale customer-facing databases for more users, keep metadata lookups fast for real‑time search, ensure 24/7 high availability, and control costs.

Rhapsody added Fusion ioMemory (ioDrive2) flash cards to key servers and optimized its Oracle environment, moving I/O bottlenecks to CPU and memory. Content‑management jobs dropped from 8–21 hours to under 2 hours (≈10x faster) and transactional jobs went from hours to about 15 minutes (≈8x faster), delivering 12–18 months of performance headroom in the same server footprint, simplified high availability via Oracle Data Guard without extra backend storage cost, and a 100% ROI from Oracle licensing savings.

Rhapsody International

Heng Cao

VP of Platform and Operations