With cinema, online, and mobile advertising channels, National CineMedia has sophisticated data needs and a large IT infrastructure to maintain and manage. For example, programming like NCM’s First Look - a 20 minute pre-show before a feature film - is delivered daily, via satellite, to thousands of theaters across the country, and each pre-show is tailored to be appropriate for a given film’s MPAA rating.
“When we’ve created a new show that will be playing in front of a blockbuster movie, we need all of our sales and content management systems running in tandem, and it can be very technically demanding,” said Al Rosabal, Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at NCM. “Having a reliable hot site for disaster recovery and business continuity is crucial for all of our platforms.”
Yet, NCM’s data center costs were high because equipment had to be shipped out of state and team members had to travel to the site. Setting up disaster recovery equipment or performing regular maintenance tasks also became difficult and time consuming. When National CineMedia looked to change their colocation provider, they choose Lunavi for the increased service level, high-availability environment, and practical driving distance from the company’s Denver, Colorado headquarters.
Lunavi was able to quickly create a hot site for replication of data from NCM’s local infrastructure that was both tailored to NCM’s requirements and included services to help keep the high-availability environment running smoothly so it could be brought online as fast as possible. Lunavi's 100% uptime SLA and ability to “burst” by instantly accommodating upticks in bandwidth usage helped NCM ensure their content would always be accessible - key to keeping their customers happy.
Every Lunavi colocation contract includes hours for hands-on support, network monitoring and notifications, fully managed reverse DNS, and a portal that customers can use to remotely perform common tasks like powering systems on and off.
“Lunavi’s model and business approach is to treat every customer as if that customer is the most important one. Throughout the installation process that’s what it really felt like,” said Rosabal.
In addition, Lunavi’s Cheyenne, Wyoming location—about 90 minutes from Denver—is close enough that Rosabal's team is able to easily travel to the data center, and geographically far enough away to satisfy NCM's auditors.
“Sometimes, 'green' implies a sacrifice for price, efficiency, or capability. My leading requirements in a data center were reliability and the services we were going to get,” said Rosabal.
Lunavi’s commitment to sustainability means using naturally cool outside air throughout most of the year instead of conventional air conditioners, and Lunavi’s facilities incorporate a design structure that allows operations to be approximately 40% more efficient than the average data center. These elements reduce overall consumption, with wind power rounding out the renewable energy strategy.
“The green aspect of working with Lunavi is an added value—their energy cost savings are passed on, so we are getting the greener footprint, but ultimately the overall cost-benefit analysis of reliability, service, location and price made a lot of sense for us, and would make sense for peer companies in the mid-market and beyond,” said Rosabal
Blue Federal Credit Union serves over 70,000 members and communities in Colorado and Wyoming, including F.E. Warren Air Force Base, the now decommissioned Rocky Flats Plant, and the community of Broomfield, Colorado. Founded in 1951, the credit union has grown to close to $900M in assets and was created by a merger between Warren Federal Credit Union and Community Financial Credit Union. When Blue FCU wanted to free up staff to work on new projects, ensure uptime for their customers, and improve business efficiency, they chose colocation from Lunavi.
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Black Hills Energy is Improving Life with Energy by Utilizing the Colocation Services of Lunavi As a natural gas and electric utility, Black Hills Energy requires 24/7 access to critical IT/business systems to deliver trusted service to over 1.2 million customers across eight states in the Midwest and Mountain West. The company also produces and sources its own natural gas and electricity across the country. With those huge responsibilities at stake and a diverse range of services, sites, and complex operations spread across a wide and varied geography, the company’s IT services can never waver.
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Over 1,800 clubs serving more than two million members worldwide trust Clubessential to provide a unified software suite designed to enhance, automate, and facilitate operations, including public websites, accounting, point-of-sale, Customer Relationship Management, and reservations software.
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