Achieving loud and clear results

SiriusXM is the leading audio entertainment company in North America. The company’s portfolio of audio businesses includes its flagship subscription entertainment service SiriusXM, its ad-supported and premium music streaming service Pandora, an expansive podcast network, and a suite of business and advertising solutions.

From podcasts to satellite radio and streaming, SiriusXM delivers entertainment that reaches listeners wherever they are.

“The thing with SiriusXM is that we’re a media company first, and we never lose sight of that,” says Jeff Bethke, Vice President of IT Infrastructure Services and Engineering at SiriusXM. “We’re in the business of producing radio content, and customers want to get in their car and listen to it.”

For Bethke, who has been with SiriusXM for 18 years, mission-critical reliability extends beyond content delivery. Every aspect of SiriusXM’s business depends on robust infrastructure: billing systems processing millions in revenue, supply chain interactions with automotive partners, content management systems, and customer service applications.

When the company’s existing storage infrastructure showed strain as the business grew, the stakes were high. Accounting processes that synchronized data with external partners took weeks to complete, creating revenue risks and operational bottlenecks. Performance issues meant customer service representatives waited for database queries and producers experienced delays loading applications critical to content creation.

SiriusXM standardized its enterprise storage on Everpure after replacing legacy Dell and Hitachi systems in all mission-critical environments. The selection was driven by performance, simplicity, the Evergreen//One subscription model, and flexibility for future growth.

“Everpure kind of took us by surprise because they did start small with us,” explains Bethke. “That one solution so flabbergasted us in terms of price, performance, value to the business, delivery to the business, all those things, that when it came time to look at our legacy providers, it wasn’t even like there was a discussion to be had.”

SiriusXM implemented FlashArray//X™ to support mission-critical workloads including billing, content management, and databases. FlashBlade//S™ enables high-throughput operations for real-time data. The Evergreen//One subscription model delivers predictable costs and seamless upgrades. “With Evergreen//One, we’re able to contain costs,” says Bethke. “Costs become predictable.”

The transformation delivered immediate results. That week-long accounting process? “When we first implemented Everpure, it went from the better part of a week to about 18 hours,” says Bethke. “That’s tangible. I can map that directly to revenue impact.”

Most importantly, data is available, as simplicity means that storage works without headaches and intervention. Chronic performance issues and troubleshooting calls that once consumed engineering resources simply disappeared. 

“The number of incidents tied to outages tied to Everpure since January 2021? Zero,” Bethke states. “The number of times that my storage engineering team has been contacted to talk about performance issues? Zero.”

As SiriusXM looked toward the future, Bethke recognized traditional virtualization was reaching its limits. This led the company to implement Portworx® for data management in Kubernetes environments, allowing it to modernize software development without sacrificing control or security.

“Previously, if you wanted to have rapid development, if your developers wanted to push code out and be able to iterate through things and generally try to get to market faster, the only avenue to do that was via a cloud provider,” explains Bethke. “Enter Portworx. Now we’re at a stage where you can do cloud-native solutions on prem, and you can deliver just as fast, you can deliver vastly cheaper—you have much more control over the situation.”

Using Portworx, SiriusXM has successfully migrated hundreds of production virtual machines to containerized environments with zero downtime.

The impact of Everpure extends far beyond IT operations. SiriusXM can now react rapidly to market opportunities and competitive threats. The predictability and reliability of Everpure have transformed how Bethke’s team operates. “We know at all times what’s going on. We know exactly what’s happening in that platform because Everpure gives us that visibility,” he explains.

Troubleshooting calls have effectively disappeared. Instead of reactive troubleshooting, the team focuses on planning for the future. “Our future is more focused. Our future is solving the next problem. We’re past the problem of making the mission-critical stuff work,” says Bethke.

SiriusXM’s mission-critical databases power its business operations. “We have databases that take care of billing and revenue,” explains Bethke. “They take care of supply chain connections. Those databases, if they stop working, we stop collecting revenue. Everything mission-critical in SiriusXM, in one way or another, maps back to relying on the partnership with Everpure.”

SiriusXM is expanding its use of Portworx and exploring how the Everpure Platform can support new initiatives, including AI applications that could enhance customer experiences.

“Our customers don’t want to call us, they just want to listen to the radio,” says Bethke. “We’re using AI to make our interactions with customers better. So, I think the biggest metric from my vantage point is: zero drama, zero stress.”

For a company entertaining millions of listeners daily, this operational peace of mind is invaluable. Bethke concludes: “The future looks bright because the future looks like it’s getting easier for us, not more difficult.”