Global entertainment giant Live Nation Entertainment, which operates online ticket sales site Ticketmaster and three other entertainment-related businesses, is putting its Ticketmaster and Live Nation Concert and Network operations into a private cloud. It is a sizable undertaking. Live Nation has 7,000 employees in 153 offices spread across 18 countries. Its revenue in 2011 was US$5.4 billion, of which Ticketmaster accounted for US$1.56 billion and other Live Nation operations US$3.8 billion.

Fourteen thousand tickets are sold per minute through transactions churning through the company's 10 data centres. The company's network is built with Cisco Nexus 7010, 5596 and 5548, and 2232 and 2248 switches and fabric extenders; Catalyst 6500, 4500, 3700, 3500, 2900 and 2800 switches; 1,150 Cisco ISR G2 branch routers; ASA 5585X, 5505 and SSP40 firewalls, and IronPort security appliances. The Nexus switches and ASA firewalls are key components of Live Nation's cloud implementation as well. Live Nation is looking to deploy an "infrastructure-as-a-service" model with logical separation of products, services and management domains among its businesses. The company is migrating all of its existing products into the IaaS cloud and developing self-service tools and APIs to give tenants from its various businesses and product lines more direct control over their environment, says Jason Brockett, director of network operations for Live Nation.

Source: Tech World