Laurie Courage details how Linux hosts the US Open with eBusiness on Demand
August 2002
One of the most demanding website applications is the hosting of major sport events, because it combines real-time reporting of scores with high traffic volumes that are difficult to profile. IBM hosts several major sports events, and uses them as a proving ground for eBusiness on Demand technology. This highly robust and available environment is being migrated to Linux, and since the US Open Tennis Championships are upon us, we took the occasion to look up Laurie Courage, Director, Internet Strategy and Web Events Worldwide Sponsorship Marketing to ask about the challenges of event hosting, and why the eBusiness on Demand infrastructure is being migrated to Linux. Here's what she had to say.
Laurie, thank you again for taking the time to talk to us about your work. You're in a specialized area of IBM corporate marketing and work with IBM Global Services (IGS) to deliver Web solutions to the sports and entertainment organizations we sponsor. Who are your customers, and are there a typical set of requirements that they come to you with?
Laurie: IBM sponsors several world class sports and entertainment events; ranging from Grand Slam tennis, such as Wimbledon and the US Open, to the Ryder Cup golf tournament and Broadway's Tony Awards. As far as their special requirements go, we face several challenges when we deliver a premier event on the Web. We have to focus on the objectives of the official site itself, objectives ranging from providing scores to fans and enhancing the image of the event, to revenue generation. And by the time the virtual doors open to the Web event itself, we have to be ready for millions of visitors and give a performance that’s equal to the quality of the event. In our kind of 24/7 environment, there is no room for downtime and when the traffic peaks, the sites require the delivery of high volumes of rapidly-changing information; usually in our case this is scores or results. We have to do it in a user friendly, resource-efficient way, but be able to scale resources on demand. We call that eBusiness on Demand.
Question: Can you tell us more about the eBusiness on Demand content serving capacity that grew out of your Web events infrastructure?
Laurie: I'd be happy to. The US Open is actually going to be our 53rd Web event, and over the past seven years we have continually reinvented our infrastructure so we can support the growing traffic needs and functionality requirements of our sites. So, as we’ve gone through these enhancements, working with IBM Research and IGS, we’ve developed a caching process to deliver a high-performance Web environment to millions of fans worldwide. We've been piloting this capability all year, and IGS has just introduced it commercially as a new eBusiness on Demand service called IBM Managed Hosting Content Serving.
Using IBM’s Content Serving solution, we have been able to reduce the cost of delivering this infrastructure, while at the same time gain access to the scalable high-performance computing that we needed for our traffic peaks. For us, it’s meant off-loading a large portion of our Web serving infrastructure out to the network. This translates into a better fan experience. Fans get a better response time, but the caching process has also reduced our transaction costs and allowed us to keep up with the popularity of these sites. So piloting this type of innovation has really worked to our advantage.
Question: A key piece of technology that you’ve been using for these live events, I understand, is something called "Gryphon." It’s subsequently become part of MQSeries. Can you talk a little bit about what Gryphon is, and how that technology came about?
Laurie: We’ve been delivering real-time data through our Web event sites for years. In the beginning, we published information and delivered it to the desktop on a downloadable Java applet that we created called the IBM Real-time Scoreboard. But as the real-time requirements and our traffic escalated, we needed to find a technology that would let us deliver the data more efficiently, while still meeting the needs of the fans. So last year, we began to test a new push technology -- developed by IBM Research and code-named Gryphon. A true test of that code came last year during a rain delay at Wimbledon. The Monday after Wimbledon was supposed to have ended, we found ourselves unexpectedly servicing three major matches. It produced a spike of 230,000 simultaneous scoreboards, and many of those were Gryphon-enabled, but we managed the load without incident.
This year, we piloted the Gryphon solution more fully using the Linux operating system at the French Open and Wimbledon, and by carefully benchmarking the publish and subscribe process, we produced a solution that is now publishing much of our scoring information. The Gryphon code worked so well that it has been integrated into a new offering, IBM WebSphere MQ Event Broker, and later this year, IBM expects to make MQ Event Broker available to customers on Linux. Because of the challenging, real-world environment of our Web events used to test this code, our customers will have the advantage of knowing that the technology has been proven on a world stage and is ready to go to work in their IT environments.
Question: Are there other application areas besides sporting events where this technology could be valuable to customers?
Laurie: In our eBusiness on Demand environment, peak demand sometimes shows up when we didn't plan for it to, and that’s very similar to what happens to many customers. For example, the retail industry sees peaks in demand in the fourth quarter during the holiday shopping period. Or customers may have an infrastructure that manages their loads fine under normal conditions, but they want to do sales promotions that will create a spike.
We’ve also found, though, that in many cases there are unforeseeable reasons that traffic will wind up on your site. A weather site may experience a surge in traffic during severe weather, or a company may have a public relations success and suddenly everyone wants to learn more about them.
We've also found that the real-time data aspect of MQ Event Broker is something that financial services organizations are very interested in, because they’re trying to stay as close as possible to their data to capture fluctuations in the financial markets, and they want to push rapidly changing information out to shareholders, stakeholders, traders or business partners.
Question: I understand that you’re migrating the underlying Web Events infrastructure to Linux. Can you talk a little bit about this and tell us why Linux is the choice you’re making here?
Laurie: As I mentioned before, innovation is very important to us and we’re constantly looking for ways to improve our environment to support high performance and stability, while also keeping our costs contained and allowing us the flexibility to grow. When we evaluated Linux last year, we saw potential benefits and since it’s been implemented, we’ve realized many of those benefits.
First of all, it’s helped us contain the labor costs associated with this growth. From a staffing perspective, many people in the industry and in universities are being trained in Linux, and going forward it will become easier to find the skills that we need to continue our development in this very important environment.
From an efficiency perspective, we are focused on the cost of our development. Linux has really afforded us the chance to develop more easily, to port applications across multiple platforms, to gain access to many different types of application development tools and code -- and often these tools are free. Since Linux is freely available, our developers have sometimes done initial development on a laptop and then moved the code to the production environment with relative ease. We've also been able to achieve some tremendous price/performance benefits. By tuning our environment to take full advantage of Linux's capabilities on xSeries servers, we were able to realize 300% growth vs. similarly-sized servers resulting in absorption of 100% year-to-year Web traffic growth for a reduced investment. I don't have to tell you how happy it makes management if you can increase capacity 100% for the same cost when budgets are under pressure.
Is there anything else that you would like to say to our audience about eBusiness on Demand and Linux?
Laurie: When we began our journey with Linux we felt that it was a nice experiment. But the performance and value we found surprised us, and today is Linux is critical to meeting our eBusiness on Demand objectives. Our major Web sports events have proven -- and continue to prove -- the capabilities of our eBusiness on Demand environment, and by including Linux as our platform and building on that open platform layer, we’ve been able to achieve remarkable benefits in development, deployment, performance, scalability and value. In sum, Linux is really helping us to grow our business here at IBM, and we want to share these benefits with our customers.
Question: Thanks for taking the time to talk to us.
