signagelive Teams with Rackspace for Media Delivery

signagelive has announced that it has moved its media-delivery infrastructure to the Rackspace Cloud.

“From advertising promotions used at London’s Harrods and on the Glasgow Metro system, to ads and digital menu boards in the takeaway food areas of the St Louis Rams American football stadium; signagelive is leading the way in terms of digital media innovation,” said Taylor Rhodes, Managing Director Rackspace International.�� “We are thrilled to be working with such an innovative company who trusts us to run their mission critical IT.”

“After a six-month global vetting process, we are thrilled with our move to a hosted managed solution provided by Rackspace,” said signagelive CEO, Jason Cremins. “Digital signage has long been held back by high IT infrastructure costs and closed, proprietary systems. Moving to a truly cloud-powered system is a first for our industry and this has the potential to truly unlock volume markets and new value chains for us. You cannot scale with software installed on a desktop computer in your closet, but you can with a system that boasts over 70,000 servers across eight data centers.”

“signagelive sees Rackspace as more than just a place to park their data or outsource computing power to,” added Rhodes. “The company has embraced the OpenStack™ tools we provide, created their own applications and optimized on top of our infrastructure. This kind of innovative approach is something we aim to nurture in partnership with our customers,” added Rhodes.

By utilizing Rackspace’s integration of its CloudFiles product with Akamai’s Content Delivery Network (CDN), signagelive is able to deliver static files quickly and efficiently to its users and media endpoints. The CDN caches content in a global multi-tier system to ensure that static files are delivered from the closest node to the end user or media endpoint, ensuring an improvement in the speed of media delivery and user interface experience.

In line with its move to Rackspace, signagelive created a custom performance monitoring application utilizing Cloud Servers and Cloud Load Balancer APIs, enabling it to scale up or down on demand when required. In times of peak (or unexpected) load, signagelive automatically increases the number of servers available to network customers, ensuring that the user experience remains a constant and is not degraded by any large spikes in traffic.

“We learned through this process how critical it is to select the right partner to grow your business with. It’s clear that signagelive isn’t just a customer, we’re a part of the Rackspace family,” said signagelive‘s Cremins.

The AVNetwork staff are storytellers focused on the professional audiovisual and technology industry. Their mission is to keep readers up-to-date on the latest AV/IT industry and product news, emerging trends, and inspiring installations.