ATLANTA, Oct. 2, 2015 — Internap Corporation INAP,-1.16% a provider of high-performance Internetinfrastructure services, today announced that weather industry leader Weather Decision Technologies (WDT) is using the company’s high-density colocation, route-optimized Performance IP™ and Content Delivery Network (CDN) services. The global high-performance environment allows WDT to cost-effectively process massive amounts of weather and climate information and accelerate delivery of critical weather services to customers around the world.
WDT delivers real-time weather information and analytics – such as hazardous weather detection and prediction, forecast modeling, geographic information systems (GIS) and interactive mapping – for a wide range of B2B audiences, including developers, broadcasting stations, oil platforms and the airline and shipping industries. Its top-ranked B2C RadarScope mobile app, available on iOS, Android and Mac, allows meteorologists and weather enthusiasts to view Nexrad radar data and severe weather warnings.
“Our business is dependent on ingesting and analyzing enormous amounts of raw weather data – often more than 80 to 90 terabytes per month – and rapidly serving it up to our customers in their preferred format,” said Andrew J. Oldaker, vice president of operations at Weather Decision Technologies. “Internap’s high-performance colocation and network services allow us to get data to our customers faster, while reducing our overall infrastructure costs. We’re able to seamlessly download very large data sets from weather services and environmental centers around the world and then quickly and reliably process and deliver that data to our customers – speeding their decision-making and giving them a competitive advantage.”
With previous infrastructure providers, WDT was experiencing spiraling costs due to the high densities needed to power its data-intensive HPC and clustered systems environment, which forms its weather analytics and delivery hub. Internap’s high-density colocation in Dallas allows WDT to achieve its power demands with fewer server racks, which has reduced its costs by nearly 45 percent. Currently drawing upwards of 12kW, WDT can continue to scale to 18kW in-rack without consuming more physical floor space as its power needs grow. Internap’s high-density design also contributes to optimal performance since WDT requires certain servers to be in close physical proximity to process large amounts of data via high-speed interconnects. Additionally, WDT installed a satellite dish at Internap’s Dallas data center, which allows the company to download meteorological data and instantly feed it to its infrastructure environment within the facility.
WDT is also using Internap’s route-optimized, global Performance IP connectivity at Internap’s Dallas, London and Secaucus, N.J. locations to eliminate the unreliable network performance and latency issues WDT was experiencing with previous providers that were using standard Internet routing to deliver its vast data sets from Europe and across the Atlantic to its data processing hub in the U.S. Powered by Managed Internet Route Optimizer™ (MIRO) technology, Performance IP enhances the Internet’s default routing system by monitoring available bandwidth routes for packet loss, jitter and latency and sending WDT traffic over the fastest Internet path. As a result, WDT is able to download data from key weather services throughout Europe and along the U.S. Eastern Seaboard and ensure fast, reliable, low-latency delivery to its analytics headquarters at Internap’s Dallas facility.
Additionally, Internap’s MIRO-powered CDN is bringing weather information closer to WDT customers by storing and delivering the data from 24 points of presence globally. The move to Internap’s CDN has resulted in faster performance for billions of customer content queries per month, with an 80ms – 100ms average reduction in latency, as well as reduced content delivery costs of 75 percent.
“Infrastructure speed and reliability are critical to organizations like WDT that need to consistently power large, data-intensive workloads and distribute real-time information worldwide,” said Steve Orchard, Internap’s senior vice president and general manager, data center and network services. “We’re uniquely equipped to serve these customers with performance built into every aspect of our portfolio – from high-power density colocation to route-optimized network services delivered across a global footprint.”
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About Weather Decision Technologies, Inc. (WDT) Weather Decision Technologies, Inc. is the industry leader, providing organizations with weather decision support on a global scale. WDT offers specific expertise with big data as it applies to hazardous weather detection and prediction, forecast modeling, decision analytics, GIS, mobile apps and interactive mapping. WDT employs the world-renowned WeatherOps forecast team, staffed by experts who provide global asset projection and commodities trading decision support. WDT maintains operational offices in Norman, Oklahoma and Houston, Texas.
About Internap Internap is the high-performance Internet infrastructure provider that powers the applications shaping the way we live, work and play. Our hybrid infrastructure delivers performance without compromise – blending virtual and bare-metal cloud, hosting and colocation services across a global network of data centers, optimized from the application to the end user and backed by rock-solid customer support and a 100% uptime guarantee. Since 1996, the most innovative companies have relied on Internap to make their applications faster and more scalable.
For more information, visit www.internap.com.
