ViaWest put Beatport in its customer newsletter.
The Q3 customer corner included us beside Mozy and another regional customer. The short profile described Beatport as a digital music store for DJs and fans. It focused on legal, high-speed, high-quality downloads.
ViaWest used that profile to explain why Beatport was in the newsletter at all.
That was the clean public description.
My view of Beatport at ViaWest was racks, power, network connections, load balancers, web servers, database servers, and storage.
In June, I had counted nine web servers and five database servers. The SAN held 30 terabytes and could grow much larger. Monthly traffic was around 80 terabytes. In August, I described the company as one of the larger hosting accounts in the facility.
ViaWest called the arrangement hybrid hosting. We could own equipment while using managed services around Windows, Linux, clustering, storage, network, power, and the data center itself.
ViaWest supplied the facility and services around the hardware. Beatport still owned equipment and operated the parts specific to the store.
The newsletter called that combination hybrid hosting. The short customer profile did not need the rack-level details behind it.
The newsletter reduced all of that to a short customer story. That was fine. A customer did not need the rack diagram to understand Beatport. DJs needed music, and the store made the files available.
The systems I worked on every day had become a public example for the company hosting them.
Beatport was in ViaWest's customer corner. I was inside ViaWest keeping Beatport running.