Ampersand Adopts Hybrid Cloud to Speed TV Insights

Whether a local or national advertiser, Ampersand helps clients reach their unique target audience and deliver their messages anytime, anywhere on any device—with a commitment to privacy. This requires timely, data-driven insights to help clients capitalize on opportunities.

To speed decision-making, Ampersand adopted a cloud-first strategy that leverages Pure Storage for increased resilience and performance in a hybrid cloud environment. Ampersand benefits from the capabilities and economics that make the cloud ideal for both disaster recovery and on-demand analytics at massive scale—and advertisers can reach their goals more efficiently.

Every day, Ampersand collects and parses aggregated viewership data to help clients reach the right audiences in more than 200 media markets and 165 networks and apps.

Aggregate viewership data insights—and the associated machine learning (ML) workloads that extract aggregated insights for advertisers—resides in Amazon Web Services (AWS). Ampersand taps the batch processing capabilities in AWS to run thousands of ML workloads concurrently at any given time, absorbing an enormous amount of data insights from multichannel video programming distributors and rating sources.

To build on the scale and performance of the cloud, Ampersand wanted to move its SQL Server and MySQL transactional data to AWS and adopt the cloud for disaster recovery. That meant retiring the physical secondary data center used specifically for backups and instead replicating data from the primary data center to the cloud.

The problem with this was twofold. “Our legacy storage was costly to maintain and didn’t have the power to handle these workloads,” says Seth Weingarten, Vice President of Network Operations at Ampersand. “And even if it did, we couldn’t move this data back to the cloud.”

Ampersand solved both challenges with Pure. Pure Storage FlashArray//X brings top performance on-premises, while Pure Storage Cloud Dedicated (formerly Cloud Block Store) delivers data portability, flexibility, and consistency in the public cloud. For robust Disaster Recovery, Ampersand uses ActiveDR™ and asynchronous replication from FlashArray into AWS.

“Pure Storage Cloud Dedicated enables us to undertake our cloud initiatives with confidence,” says Weingarten. “With Pure Storage Cloud Dedicated on AWS, we get the best of both private and public cloud and maintain complete control over our data.”

Pure Storage Cloud Dedicated proved simple to deploy and manage. From the Pure1 interface, Ampersand can move volumes into the cloud or repatriate data to the physical data center without reformatting data or refactoring applications. Ampersand is consuming less storage capacity in AWS with Pure snapshots, achieving average data reduction rates of 5:1. The company gains better performance, at a lower cost, with complete data portability.

Having aggregated viewership and transactional data reside in the cloud accelerates time to insights for Ampersand’s clients. “Pure helps us deliver data insights that drive tangible results for advertisers,” says Weingarten. “Our gain is their gain.”