4-page Case Study - Posted 3/11/2009

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SK Communications

Service Provider Establishes New Basis for Enterprise-wide Data Platform Operation

In the early 2000s, there was a large number of players in the cyber community market, conducting unlimited competition among two leading companies and several minor brands. Under this chaos, one service caused a sensation, conquering the Korean Internet community market in a single breath. This service is none other than ‘Cyworld Brand Mini Homepage’. At a time when personal sites did not exist except for individuals’ homepages, the emergence of a mini homepage was more than a shock. Since then the service of Cyworld’s Mini Homepage, which aggressively opened the era of one page per person, showed explosive growth and, as of 2008, it has achieved about 22 million subscribers, positioning itself securely as the representative SNS (Social Network Service) of Korea. There is one significant factor that is worth looking into in Cyworld’s growth as a nationwide service – SK Communications’ IT capability, which can provide consistent, reliable and trustworthy service in the face of data flood caused by a daily increase in number of users. Since the beginning of its service to 2008, SQL Server has been the core of Cyworld’s IT infrastructure , and the company boasts the highest level of proficiency about SQL Server in the industry. In its most recent SQL Server 2008 related pilot project, the company is expected to examine new functionalities for enterprise-wide data management.

Situation

SK Communications is a globally competitive online service provider that delivers new concepts in Internet services. They are the creators of ‘Cyworld’ (www.cyworld.com), Korea’s number one community portal; ‘NATE.com’ (www.nate.com), a web 2.0 portal; ‘NATE-ON’ (nateonweb.nate.com), a messenger service; ‘Empas’ (www.empas.com), a search engine portal; ‘Etoos’ (www.etoos.com), an education portal; and ‘Egloos’ (www.egloos.com), a personal blog site. SK Communications’ online universe is now expanding beyond Korea’s language frontier. From a strong foothold at home, SK Communications has made successful entries into China, Japan, the US, and Europe, offering online services and content available nowhere else.

We were able to realize a 30% increase in server performance and 50% decrease in storage capacity. In addition to hardware cost savings, SQL Server 2008 also provided significant software cost savings. Ryu Chong Hoon Manager of system infrastructure department, SK Communications

As such, much attention must be placed on data management in order to maintain this service that enables sharing and upgrading of various multimedia content including text, pictures and videos. The data piled up in Cyworld contains valuable records of its users as well as valuable traces left by the networking of its users.

The importance of proper data management is huge and, from the database administrator’s perspective, the data uploaded by the users is massive and diverse.

SK Communications decided to upgrade its SQL Server 2000 environment, which its system infrastructure department/DB technical team used for almost seven years and had stabilized to an optimal state, in order to further advance its enterprise-wide data management as well as resolve inexpressible concerns. In other words, it decided to upgrade to SQL Server 2005, the standard version of DBMS.

While reviewing DBMS standardization with SQL Server 2005, the system infrastructure department/DB technical team also reviewed the functionalities of SQL Server 2008. Judging that predicting the speed of data expansion will become more difficult, they thought about converging the most advanced data management technology and methodology in the already standardized SQL Server 2005.

As such, the time had come to realize their idea of not losing out on advantages offered by the latest technology while guaranteeing reliability and stability. Ryu Chong Hoon, Team Manager of the System Infrastructure department/DB technical team, said, “Thinking to use SQL Server 2008 in advance, we asked Microsoft Korea for an RDP (Rapid Development Project). Later, through training support including seminars, we were able to come into contact with the major functions of SQL Server 2008 and conduct direct function testing internally.” He added, “Based on the review results, we chose our 20TB-sized old Visitors Log service as the most appropriate target as an example to apply SQL Server 2008.”

Solution

The System Infrastructure department/DB technical team’s selection of the old Visitors Log service is based on their concerns about data expansion. This service consists of simple text, but they have been concerned for a long time about its increasing speed to guarantee effective management and availability. Thus, they decided to target this Visitors Log service for RDP in search of new methods and not just applying the old formula of ‘data increase = hardware expansion’.

The System Infrastructure department/DB technical team tried to apply an ILM (Information Lifecycle Management) concept in the data management of the Visitors Log. They conducted data analysis based on ILM and based on the results they recognized a substantial variation in query frequency, the most innovative standard separating the stages of lifecycle in systems similar to Visitors Log.

Based on the fact that a clear difference was shown in query frequency between recent one-year data and later data, they classified data into high query frequency and low query frequency. Later, the System Infrastructure department/DB technical team configured the infrastructure with high availability equipment for the latest data and slightly lower grade equipment for old data. They configured hardware because they took into consideration the characteristics of Visitors Log, where if the query frequency falls into a high period, then the related traffic can be enormous and guaranteed availability is a must.

Even though they applied cost versus optimal management methodology and hardware configuration, the System Infrastructure department/DB technical team still had one challenge—how they would handle the trend of data increase, which increases several TBs every year. To address this issue, they focused on one keyword while receiving technical training about SQL Server 2008 RDP and reviewing related materials. This keyword was ‘compression’.

Ryu says, “We realized that if we utilize the compression function, one of the major strengths of SQL Server 2008, then we can improve the performance of DBMS rather than unconditionally expand hardware. As such, we chose the Visitors Log system as our target system for RDP and aggressively began the actual project in July 2008.”

SQL Server 2008 was first applied in the old Visitors Log system and the existing data was migrated in two phases. The System Infrastructure department/DB technical team first migrated the materials of the SQL Server 2000 to 2005 and then re-migrated them to 2008. Ryu says, “In this process, we used the VARCHARMAX of SQL Server 2005 and performing tuning tasks. Then we performed data migration to SQL Server 2008. In this process, we used table compression.”

Why pass through two phases? The System Infrastructure department/DB technical team reviewed all possible technologies for managing the capacity of the old Visitors Log and determined this optimal combination of VARCHARMAX and data compression function. So they performed the migration of these two SQL Servers in order to use these two functions to check what advantages they can achieve in the enterprise-wide standard DBMS version of SQL Server 2005 environment and what increased effects they can achieve if they add the latest functions of SQL Server 2008 in this environment.

In addition to hardware cost savings, SQL Server 2008 also provided significant software cost savings. If we had performed the same tasks on either UNIX or Oracle, then the costs would have been increased by above 2.5-fold. Ryu Chong Hoon Manager of system infrastructure department, SK Communications

Thus, the System Infrastructure department/DB technical team confirmed an easy maintenance and management method for the old Visitors Log, which consists of massive amounts of simple text that cannot be handled thoughtlessly and they decided to proceed with the hardware configuration. The System Infrastructure department/DB technical team designed a three-level hardware configuration enabling operation of SQL Server 2008. For instance, they configured HA by compiling two servers as a cluster and used SQL Server 2008’s Database Mirroring feature for connection with the backup server. While configuring the hardware, the System Infrastructure department/DB technical team fully realized the benefits of SQL Server 2008’s Data Compression function.

Thanks to the highly advanced compression function, they were able to guarantee transaction performance without worrying about network overload. As of September 2008, they had completed all tasks and are planning migration of their new Visitors Log to SQL Server 2008.

Benefits

The SQL Server 2008 RDP project progress provided an opportunity to the System Infrastructure department/DB technical team for opening new possibilities in data management and these can be summarized into the following:

Increased server performance by 30% and decreased storage capacity by 50%
The first benefit is realizing an effective method for handling data increase. Ryu says, “By using SQL Server 2005’s VARCHARMAX with SQL Server 2008’s Data Compression function, we were able to realize 30% increase in server performance and 50% decrease in storage capacity.” SK Communications directly confirmed that it can respond fully to capacity issues through optimization. From the company’s perspective, this benefit leads to both hardware and software cost savings.

Ryu adds, “In addition to hardware cost savings, SQL Server 2008 also provided significant software cost savings. If we had performed the same tasks on either UNIX or Oracle, then the costs would have been increased by above 2.5-fold.”

Acquired initial proficiency about SQL Server 2008
The second benefit is enhancing the capability of the System Infrastructure department/DB technical team about SQL Server to a future-oriented ability. In other words, the team has acquired a level of expertise on SQL Server 2008. For companies like SK Communications that are creating business on the Internet, IT infrastructure operation capability is a core capability. From this perspective, this benefit is extremely meaningful to the System Infrastructure department/DB technical team, which acquired experience in SQL Server 2008, much ahead of others.

Ryu says, “Cyworld has been reliably utilizing SQL Server while it has been growing explosively. Our in-house DBAs and Microsoft Korea cooperated closely with each other to stabilize our service operation on SQL Server 2000, setting examples to prove the incorrect perceptions about SQL Server. Moreover, SK Communications’ proficiency and capability on SQL Server have continued to SQL Server 2008 with the RDP as an opportunity.”

Established mid- to long-term direction about DBMS deployment and operation
The third benefit is establishing detailed directions about DBMS deployment and operation from a mid- to long-term perspective. SK Communications, like other Internet service providers, uses and tests all DBMS that have been released into the market. SQL Server is a standard DBMS that has the most market share in the world.

It has been a standard environment particularly in the case of Cyworld since the beginning of service. With this RDP as an opportunity, Cyworld’s SQL Server operation is expected to adopt a more flexible strategy. Ryu says, “Cyworld’s basic policy is to deploy SQL Server 2005 as a standard DBMS, but for business areas that can benefit through SQL Server 2008’s advanced functions, we plan to operate them together on the 2008 version. Currently we plan to complete migration of the new Visitors Log to SQL Server 2008 by October.” He adds, “In addition to the Visitors Log, we are reviewing OLAP and are aware of SQL Server 2008’s strength in DW and OLAP, which is as strong as its strength in compression. As such, we are aggressively reviewing SQL Server 2008 to utilize OLAP and data mining.”

Microsoft Server Product Portfolio
For more information about the Microsoft server product portfolio, go to: www.microsoft.com/servers/default.mspx

For More Information
For more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234 in the United States or (905) 568-9641 in Canada. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to: www.microsoft.com

For more information about SK Communications products and services, call 82-3432-1114 or visit the Web site at: http://corp.nate.com/eng/

This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.

Document published February 2009