Turner Case Study
Global News and Entertainment
Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. (TBS, Inc.), a Time Warner company, is a major producer of news and entertainment product around the world and the leading provider of programming for the basic cable industry. TBS, Inc. is also home to The Atlanta Braves, nascar.com and pga.com, and employs more than 8,000 people worldwide.
TBS, Inc.'s groundbreaking CNN is a well-known and trusted source for news and information that now includes 15 cable and satellite television networks, two private, place-based networks, two radio networks, 12 Web sites, CNN Mobile, and CNN Newsource, the world's most extensively syndicated news service. TBS, Inc. is also home to familiar entertainment networks such as TBS, TNT, Cartoon Network, and Turner Classic Movies as well as specialized networks such as Turner South and Boomerang.
Managing a Worldwide Network
The TBS network comprises a wide variety of infrastructure sizes and types around the world. The Network Engineering department wihin Turner Technology Services is responsible for both domestic and international infrastructure, and faced a challenging time tracking down and correcting application performance problems across such a diverse network.
“We needed a better way to monitor the health of the network in real time,” says John Zientowski, a network engineer in the department. “Our existing tools gave us device information that didn't tell us much about application performance, and couldn't get information from distant parts of our infrastructure, while our various protocol-oriented tools gave us a very limited view of application issues that wasn't real time.” In addition, he notes, “it was difficult to tie performance problems to the business units affected, information we needed to prioritize our response to complaints.”
Real-Time, End-to-End Insight
Since ACE Live appliances can be very quickly installed via SPAN/mirror port or tap without network impact, TBS decided to try the ACE Live appliance in their main data center in Atlanta, Georgia.
“Its flow-based view immediately showed us information about our network that was nearly impossible to get with our existing tools,” says Zientowski. “And once we'd entered our Business Group information, we found we could very quickly isolate issues to specific parts of our network, which is really important given our global reach.”
For instance, when TBS rolled out a Broadband Global Area Network (BGAN) with French partners, the system initially suffered from packet loss issues. “With the [ACE Live] we quickly zeroed in on the cause and, working with the vendors involved, were able to fix it wihtout a lot of fingerpointing.” He notes that the rich set of visual tools in the ACE Live interface-charts, tables, and topology displays-make it easy to prove what's going on to vendors, partners, and service providers.
Mr. Zientowski especially appreciates the ability of the ACE Live solution to immediately identify which users or resources (Business Groups) and which applications are affected, and to drill down to the specific flows or conversations involved. This makes it much easier to communicate with various business users and explain just what is degrading user experience. “It's really great to be able to say ‘it's not the network' and prove it,” he says. “And when it is, we can often fix it before users start to complain.”
Growing with ACE Live
Asked what he would tell his peers in other companies about the ACE Live solution, John commented: ‘I'd tell them to try it for a while-that's the most convincing thing about the appliance. The more you use it, the more problems you'll find it can help you quickly solve, leaving you more time for other tasks that you never seemed to have enough time for.” He especially notes how much faster problem solving is with the new ACE Live Insights: point-and-click action guides that encapsulate best practices for dozens of common management tasks.
“Not only do the Insights speed up our problem-solving, but they make it even easier to communicate what's going on with less technical people. A big time saver!”
"Compared to our other tools, the [ACE Live] Enterprise appliances give us a deeper, more business-oriented view of our network-both real-time and historical, while their flexible user interface really sets the product apart from the competition in terms of ease of use. And I'm really impressed with the new Insights: they make a great product even better.”
John Zientowski
Network Engineer
Turner Broadcasting System