The Problem

With its broad roster of new stars and legendary artists, songwriters, and merchandising, Warner Music Group is home to a collection of the best-known record labels in the music industry. The company was concerned over the resilience of their three legacy data center facilities across New Jersey and California — which led to the IT team spending too much time maintaining the IT infrastructure vs. focusing on value-enhancing projects.

When the contracts were coming to a close for two of their data centers, Ralph Munsen, CIO of Warner Music Group, knew it was time to consolidate legacy data centers and reduce the company's cloud footprint with a single data center operator that could provide state-of-the-art security and 24/7, 365 support with unmatched customer service, performance and reliability.

The Solution

Warner Music Group selected Markley Group based on the company's strong reputation of worldwide excellence for its multi-tenant, mission-critical telecommunications and data center facility.

To help alleviate some of the burdens on their IT Team, Warner Music Group enrolled in Markley's Enhanced Eyes and Ears service as part of their 24x7 support, for access to trained and experienced technicians to provide troubleshooting, installation assistance, racking & stacking services, and more, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. With Markley's Enhanced Eyes and Ears service, Warner Music Group never had to set foot in the Markley data center, which was extremely helpful as the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted traditional business travel. Instead, Markley's skilled technicians handled the equipment installation and completed the entire process of going live, without requiring any of Warner Music Group's IT staff to make the trek.

With Markley Colocation, Warner Music Group was able to ensure their IT infrastructure is protected by state-of-the-art, uninterruptible power and backup systems, with access to high-density applications, dark fiber availability, and highly redundant power and cooling measures.

In addition, Warner Music Group also took advantage of the Markley Network Fabric to gain direct access to every major cloud provider, including the only AWS Direct Connect location in New England, as well as direct Internet access redundantly provisioned across diverse paths, hardware and providers. With the Markley Network Fabric, Warner Music Group gained enterprise-grade, highly reliable, and high-performant switch connectivity directly to the home regions of multiple cloud providers such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and dozens more.

The Results

Choosing Markley's state-of-the-art facilities, world class operations and uptime history allowed Warner Music Group to mitigate risk to the business. The company gained highly-available systems, consistent cooling and power, uninterruptible networking, unlimited bandwidth, and superior performance.

With Markley's customizable suite and cage designs, Warner Music Group was able to easily host its IT infrastructure for a fraction of the cost of their previous data center. Markley Group provided the high density solutions needed to enable Warner Music Group to fit more in a rack unit and thus significantly reduce overall hardware expenditure. With Markley Group, Warner Music Group was able to reduce operating costs by 36%, empowering the multinational entertainment and record label conglomerate to invest those funds in other aspects of the business that better improve the company's bottom line.

Conclusion

Markley Group provides Warner Music Group with the security, reliability, and uptime options to stay one step ahead of today's network infrastructure demands across the global music industry. With Markley, Warner Music Group is able to rest assured that the data across its record labels, artists, songwriters and copyrights is safe and secure.