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August 16, 1999

Network Pressure

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Illustration by August Stein

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CNN sends its video content to Intervu Inc. and its audio content to Broadcast.com Inc. Intervu has servers located on the networks of Level 3 Communications Inc. and DBN Corp., and Broadcast.com has servers on the Level 3 network, providing alternative paths to stream CNN's audio and video news reports over the Internet.

That may not be enough. CNN is considering setting up a third data center at a carrier's site to improve the site's performance and availability even more. But Mullig vows to keep most functions in-house. "We think it's a competitive necessity to know the latest and greatest technology," he says. "Network providers just know how to provide facilities, but they don't know how to engineer really big sites."

Mullig won't discuss the specific costs of running a multimillion-dollar Web site such as CNN's, but analysts say the site is one of the best in making use of technology and techniques to ensure availability. "They understood right up front everything about reliability, scalability, and the handling of events," says Al Lill, an analyst with Gartner Group. "You can never throw enough money at these things."

Another approach to redundancy is multiple server farms. Barnesandnoble.com LLC, the online arm of the nationwide bookstore chain, operates a cluster of commerce servers in New York and maintains replicated servers at hosting facilities operated by America Online and Cable & Wireless plc.

Photo by Giorgio Palmisano Barnesandnoble.com uses Cisco Systems' DistributedDirector, a load-balancing system that starts at $17,000, to direct traffic to commerce servers that can best process transactions and serve up requested information, says Robert Dykman, VP of technical infrastructure. Load-balancing devices intelligently route traffic to servers or server farms that have the most resources available to process the transactions and keep traffic from hitting servers that are overly busy or that have failed.

Other load-balancing products work on the local level, routing traffic and maximizing server availability within a server farm. The Motley Fool Inc., a provider of online investment information, installed a Big/ip load-balancing appliance from F5 Inc. when it recently updated its commerce site. The $9,990 device provides redundancy and fault tolerance and makes the commerce site easier to administer and maintain, says Dwight Gibbs, Motley Fool's chief technologist. "If we want to do maintenance on one box, we're able to take servers in and out of rotation easily," he adds.

Floral Balance
Load balancing can also help commerce sites that have different classes of customers. Take the fast-growing 1-800-Flowers.com commerce site, which boosted the number of its commerce servers from 30 to 80 last year to keep up with increased Internet traffic and transactions. In addition to processing transactions from consumers, the servers also support an order-processing system called BloomLink that lets affiliated florists process and fulfill orders as they come into the 1-800-Flowers.com system. Business partners logged on to the BloomLink extranet can access their orders, download information to their point-of-sale system, and process other database-intensive information.

To ensure that servers are available when business partners need them, 1-800-Flowers.com has deployed load-balancing software from IPivot Inc. The software has improved the performance and overall reliability of the extranet by balancing transactions and requests among multiple servers, says director of network services Dee.

But the performance of servers accessed by consumers is more important, he says. "I can afford a few minutes of downtime with my business partners because we're in business together--we're a family. But if I'm not available for my consumers, they'll go somewhere else."

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