123 Million Users – and We Still Didn’t Miss a Beat

Aggregion is very much at home with British punctuality and serious treatment afforded to security issues. As a company that manages distribution of digital content, we swear by reliability. Ours is indeed a new, promising system – what with over 13 million licenses for video, music, electronic books and other content already uploaded to Aggregion’s servers.
But what of the servers themselves? Will they deliver at peak loads? Not that we had any doubts they would, but to prove the point we decided to demonstrate that the system is perfectly capable of stable performance at any load.

Aggregion: 123 Million and Counting!
Aggregion has developed a platform for the specific purpose of licensing content and tracking licenses on the way from copyright holders to distributors and resellers to end users. This unique solution designed to meet the most demanding modern standards makes no use of third party software that has not been optimized for DRM or may fail at peak loads when user demand is the greatest.
To verify Aggregion’s performance at peak loads, we decided to load test the system in collaboration with Intel’s engineers. Once the system was deployed on servers made available by Intel – the world’s leading producer of processor chips – we have taken our time monitoring its performance in different situations and optimizing internal processes. The results are impressive indeed. The system proved itself capable of serving up to 123 million users daily, maintaining server response time at a comfortable enough level.

How the Tests were Run
Engineers from our two companies came together to simulate situations where system loads would be highest. We used interactive content from some of the world’s largest copyright holders as data for the test.
It is a special feature of Aggregion’s that every content copy received from the system is encrypted using a fairly long code, which is unique for every particular user. The parameters of the user’s PC or smartphone and a number of other unique identifiers are taken into account when generating such keys. Additionally, the system generates a sufficient number of documents in real time, which, as a rule, has a serious impact on performance.
As part of the testing program, the Azbuka (ABC) package for accessing interactive digital textbooks was deployed on the servers. To generate external server loads, we simulated simultaneous downloading and viewing of digital textbooks of several gigabytes each.

Equipment Used for Testing
You could say Aggregion is an Intel-oriented platform, and a substantial part of its functionality is only possible due to the capabilities offered by Intel’s processors. For this testing program, we used Intel®Xeon®E5-26xxv3-based servers with 16-32 GB of RAM running Windows® 2012R2 and RedHat®Linux.
IntelXeonE5-26xxv3-based server processors with up to 35 GB of cache memory have been specifically developed for storage and computational systems and networks. They offer impressive speeds and energy efficiency, which helps support larger computational models and increase the speed of iteration.
IntelXeonE5-26xxv3 chips have been optimized for the needs of cloud services and telecommunication solutions. Every socket has up to 18 cores and LLC cache of up to 45 MB, as well as supports DDR4 memory modules, which substantially improve performance too.
The large number of cores and DDR4 architecture proved beneficial in cache memory tests. With IntelXeonE5-26хх3, we achieved transmission speeds in excess of 450 GB/s. That made a critical difference for cryptography tasks, i.e. securely encrypting content before transmitting it to the user. High-performance data processing at this stage is one of the crucial requirements copyright holders make of any system.
Let us say it again: as compared to its predecessors, IntelXeonE5-26хх3 has 50% more cores and cache memory. It also supports additional high-performance functionality, such as Intel (R)AVX2 and Intel®QPI. The PSPC technology dynamically adjusts power supply to each of the cores. All this innovation helps achieve a 2.2 times productivity increase across a wide range of loads.

Test Results
Joint testing conducted by Intel and Aggregion personnel indicated that the system is well suited to handle 123 million users without crashing. We have thus set a productivity record for applications offered by the largest of copyright holders on the Aggregion platform.
Aggregion’s software can spread the load across all the available cores and thus make full use of the computing power offered by all multicore processors. The processor has sufficient technical capacity for that, and sufficient cache definitely helps too. Additionally, as our tests made abundantly clear, what matters is not only the number of cores but proper software optimization as well. Working together with Intel, we have developed a way to efficiently distribute the load, achieving substantial performance gains.
Data compression before transmission proved to be quite successful across different types of content and communications channels because Aggregion’s platform has been optimized to take full advantage of servers with a large number of processing cores. The processor aced a number of large virtual projects deployed on our platform. Not once did we experience any capacity shortage.
To conclude, let us mention that the system has quite a lot of spare capacity and may easily be scaled up – first and foremost, by adding more servers.

123 Million Isn’t the End of It!
Aggregion’s platform may be deployed in its entirety on a number of servers. Alternatively, a standalone group of servers may be used to run any specific part of the system. Additionally, Aggregion may allocate wider channels to particular projects.
The platform can handle not just audio, video and digital books, but also games, applications and other content. A wide range of customizable licensing parameters that copyright holders can set substantially expand the choices available to them and helps build DLM into virtually any type of content whatsoever. Such an approach is also suitable for licensing games, which these days bring millions. Aggregion will live up to its promise every time, from the moment the new game, movie or album is released on. Our platform is widely used in the CIS countries and elsewhere worldwide. Jump on!

AGGREGION
Content Protection and Licensing Platform
Multi-level distribution system with flexible licensing Detailed traceability per content item
Static and interactive content available
both online and offline

1 Berkeley Street, Mayfair, London, W1J 8DJ, United Kingdom

This release was published on openPR.