This and other lessons about Linux and outsourcing from CTO at DVD rental business

Sept.13, 2007 Network World| Key to DVDPlay's business is ensuring that IT runs as efficiently as possible. Otherwise, the business model that calls for renting DVDs for just $1.49 per night would quickly become unworkable.

On its way to building a robust, efficient retail kiosk environment, Jens Horstmann, CTO and vice president at DVDPlay, says the company has learned lessons from both its good and bad experiences, with the biggest being to spend as much time on upfront planning as possible (Horstmann spoke recently at the Network World IT Roadmap event in Santa Clara, Calif.)

"If we could go back and spend more time planning, testing and really understanding the environment, we would have saved ourselves a lot of time and headaches," he says. "What happens with data centers and remote retail deployments like ours is that you create your own legacy very quickly. Swapping something out, especially when you're running 24x7, becomes a major effort. It's open heart surgery, because you cannot shut the system down."

Here are three other lessons DVDPlay has learned:

1. Choose Linux. DVDPlay kiosks have internal PCs running Windows, but the company is switching them over to Linux in an effort to make them more robust and easier to service remotely.

"Windows is just not designed for remote administration," Horstmann says. "It gives us a lot of headaches. We have to reboot machines, and we have to do security upgrades constantly. When something freezes up, it costs us $150 just to send a tech out to press the reset button. We need something that is extremely stable, can be remote-controlled and upgraded, and is designed from the beginning for remote administration, and Linux fits the bill much better."

2. Split up online transaction processing (OLTP) and data mining. At first, DVDPlay kept its two key applications, online transaction processing and data mining, together on the same servers. But as time went on, it realized it could save money by splitting off the two environments. This is because the OLTP, while more critical and real-time in nature, is more lightweight, whereas the data mining is not real-time but requires more processing horsepower.

"With a few thousand kiosks and every kiosk holding a few hundred disks, you need to have pretty sophisticated algorithms that tell you which disks are renting more than others so that in the future, you can order more comedy titles for this location, but action titles for another," he says. "We need some heavy-duty computing for that and we are planning to build clusters to support that environment, keeping it separate from the transaction environment. I would have done that at first if I had realized the requirements."

3. Don't be afraid to outsource. This is one area where Horstmann says DVDPlay got it right from the start. The company outsourced everything from some of the Web services software development to DVD distribution. The distribution portion is especially critical.

"Every week, we have 20 to 30 copies of the one or two new titles that just came out going to a kiosk, and at the same time, titles that have done their job and are three or four months old, need to go back to the distributor for a credit," Horstmann says. "It's essentially like a breathing lung. If we tried to do this ourselves, we would need hundreds of people."

Instead, DVDPlay built an XML-based Web service that communicates directly with UPS, which handles the weekly pickup and delivery of the various DVDs. To swap out disks in its kiosks, the company partners with merchandising firms that visit the various retail sites anyway. The partner company simply picks up the UPS package waiting for them at the store’s service desk.

"They already know what disks are coming in because we issued the P.O. electronically," Horstmann explains, noting UPS notifications confirm when the disks are delivered. "So the entire system monitors itself. It allows us to bring the retail cost down to a level where we can run our business model."