InformationWeek
Defining The Business Value Of Technology
August 16, 1999
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E-commerce has made network availability the highest priority and downtime more costly than ever
By Brian Riggs and Mary E. Thyfault
"In the past, if a company's computer system went down for 10 minutes, that would not affect the worth of its stock," says Norman Dee, director of network services at 1-800-Flowers Inc., which sells floral arrangements and gifts over the Internet and operates an extranet for business partners. "But corporations can no longer afford the embarrassment of their commerce servers not being available. Because of this extraordinary exposure to doing business over the Internet and extranets, companies such as ours have to ensure that there is constant availability."
To meet that requirement, IT managers are employing a host of new devices, techniques, network designs, and services to improve the performance and availability of their commerce systems, networks, and applications and reduce the likelihood that their sites won't be working when a potential customer comes calling.
An obvious tactic for ensuring availability is redundancy--redundant servers, server farms, and communications links. When redundancy is combined with other products and techniques such as caching, load balancing, and policy networking, a company can make great strides to ensure its systems and networks are always available, even if pieces should fail.
A prime example is the Web site operated by CNN, its global operation for news gathering and distribution. CNN operates two data centers, each connected to a different power grid. Three local telephone companies--MCI Metro, MFS, and BellSouth--have separate connections into each data center. Long-distance companies also have high-speed links into each data center: two 155-Mbps pipes from UUnet, one from Sprint, one from AT&T, and one on order from Qwest Communications, as well as a 45-Mbps circuit from GTE Internetworking.
"We could lose one and get through an average peak," says Monty Mullig, VP of CNN Internet Technologies in Atlanta. CNN has designed its site, which generates advertising revenue, to have enough bandwidth and server capacity to handle three times its average load. That's important for a site that experiences unexpected spikes in traffic because of breaking news events, yet must always be available, because news breaks around-the-clock.
CNN makes its news available over the Internet in many formats, including Web pages and streaming audio and video. To get its content to users more quickly, CNN recently contracted with startup Akamai Technologies Inc. to cache--or store--copies of its content on up to 600 servers located on the networks of 20 Internet service providers. Akamai also monitors traffic on the Net and routes traffic over communications links and to servers that are experiencing the least amount of congestion.
Because many of its customers want to hear audio reports or see video clips, CNN also uses aggregators of streaming media to ensure that content is available when traffic spikes. During President Clinton's impeachment trial earlier this year, requests for video downloads soared 100-fold. "It's tough enough to build capacity that is three times our normal mode," Mullig says. "We couldn't deliver the video and serve up our regular content."
Illustration by August Stein
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owntime is a dirty word for it managers. their goal in building systems and networks has always been to ensure that bandwidth and computing resources are available when needed. But the growth of electronic commerce has raised the stakes. The penalty for system crashes and network failures is greater than ever, and the loss of sales and customers is just the beginning. Now, downtime can result in falling stock prices, as happened when eBay Inc.'s online auction site crashed in June, or in a government probe, as when the Securities and Exchange Commission launched an investigation into a series of crashes involving several online stock-trading systems.
Risks And Rewards
The risks and the rewards have never been greater. Companies spend an average of $1 million to launch an E-commerce site, with many costing between $6 million and $20 million, according to Forrester Research. Whether they're selling products, services, information, or advertising, these companies are all trying to grab a piece of a rapidly growing pie. More than $18 billion worth of merchandise will be sold via E-commerce in the United States this year, a figure that's expected to jump to nearly $53 billion in 2003, according to Forrester.
continued...page 2, 3, 4, 5
Photo of Dee by Chriss Wade
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