How digitalme opened the door to eDirectory
"Over a period of several months, CNN and Novell had a number of discussions on how CNN's Web business might be able to leverage various technologies offered by Novell.
"The Novell team originally came down to do a presentation on digitalme?," explains Monty Mullig, Vice President of CNN Interactive Technologies. "We immediately noticed the directory service that powers digitalme? It clicked in our minds that NDS might be able to technologically address a problem we were working on in a different space."
CNN wanted to deliver their personalized content on their home pages-CNN.COM, CNNFN.COM, and CNNSI.COM. With these pages acting as the main portals to their sites, they couldn't afford to allow personalization to negatively affect performance. "They wanted their front pages to have at least four or five blocks of customization," states Duane Bourgeois, Novell System Engineering Manager with reponsibility for the CNN relationship. "So when you hit CNN.COM, you might see your top five stocks or weather
for a couple different zip codes? They were looking at various Internet solutions as well as developing it in-house on their internal database, but after doing some research they recognized the performance characteristics weren't what they needed."
It became apparent to CNN that this application needed much greater performance than their internal database was designed to deliver. So, they started looking at other
solutions. They needed to find a system that could quickly retrieve user preferences and then personalize the content. As a result, the needed solution would be required to
handle a lot more reads than writes; a situation ideally suited to NDS' strengths.
"We started down the track actually looking at product developed in the Internet space as opposed to the traditional directory," explains CNN's Mullig. "But they didn't have the performance or the flexibility of an accomplished directory structure such as NDS." CNN needed to be able to service 2,000 requests per second with 100% success. Some of that time would need to be allocated to DNS resolution, wire latency, and injection of personalized advertising, leaving only 250 milliseconds for NDS to do a directory lookup and personalize the content.
The Novell team tested fifty NT workstations each doing ten requests per second against a single NetWare server running NDS. Without taking advantage of NDS replication and
multiple servers running NDS, the single directory server handled 500 requests per second with less than 60 milliseconds of latency.
"After we determined the response time was there, it then became a matter of scalability. The SuperLab set up a situation using billions of users and the latency was
still there." The test results clearly showed that the linear nature of NDS response times could easily meet CNN's performance requirements.
"We were looking for NDS to do very fast retrieval with very high data volumes on individual Web queries," says Mullig. " It performed well within our performance requirements."
This in-house testing ultimately led them to make the decision to go live with NDS as their user profile solution.
Novell Consulting
To facilitate their deployment, CNN Interactive took advantage of Novell Consulting and Pre-Sales Engineering to design, plan, and implement the integration of NDS eDirectory into the CNN infrastructure. "It was a joint effort between Novell and CNN," says Bourgeois. "We spent a couple weeks evaluating how the schema needed to look? We brought out Novell's NDS engineers to discuss the concept of using LDAP auxiliary classes? We suggested the specifications for the servers? We went onsite and together we installed the software and built everything."
Cross-Platform Support
One of the features that CNN appreciated about NDS eDirectory was its cross-platform support. Since CNN primarily utilizes Sun Solaris in their Web farm, they liked the idea that if they wanted to they could put NDS on Solaris as easily as they could on NetWare. NDS eDirectory can span multiple environments, allowing for complete integration of disparate information systems. NDS eDirectory runs on Windows NT, Windows 2000, NetWare, Solaris, Linux, and soon on Compaq Tru64 as well.
Ultimately, CNN decided to implement NDS on a NetWare 5 platform using four Compaq ProLiant 6400s each with 2GB of RAM. Each directory server dedicated 1.5GB of memory to NDS and the remaining 500MB was allocated for NetWare 5. Each server also had three 100Mbps Ethernet cards, although the current load only requires one to be activated for now. Two of the cards will eventually be load balanced (one IP address) and bound to LDAP to address future scalability. The other Ethernet card will be able to be put on a separate subnet to handle communication between the NDS servers.
Personalized e-Relationships
NDS eDirectory provides the best platform for developing secure and custom e-relationships. It allows organizations to capture identity information on customers,
suppliers, and business partners. This identity information enables organizations such as CNN to create highly personalized profiles on everyone that interacts with their
e-business. As a result, NDS eDirectory lets CNN tailor their services according to the individual needs and desires of their audience. These custom offerings and services enable CNN, and other organizations that take advantage of NDS eDirectory, to build loyalties to their business that will have a positive impact on profitability. Additionally, as the customer preference and identity information grows within NDS eDirectory, that information can be used to create target audiences for additional business offerings and expansion. As a result, NDS eDirectory lets CNN leverage and maintain their identity information in a way that lets them get the most out of their e-relationships.
From the beginning, CNN's primary goal has been to deliver fast, personalized content from their home pages in such a way that their audience would get the information they
want as soon as they want it. NDS eDirectory enables CNN to do just that as CNN's Mullig explains, "NDS eDirectory allows us to maintain profiles of user preferences and
target our advertising without impact on performance."
NDS eDirectory allows CNN customers to enjoy their Web experience with news personalized to their preferences and advertising targeted to their unique tastes. To do this, CNN stores user identity and preference information in NDS eDirectory.
Targeted Advertising
One of the benefits of using NDS eDirectory for tracking and maintaining user identity information is that it gives organizations such as CNN the ability to deliver targeted
advertising to their customers. Targeted advertising means that displayed ad banners will more likely coincide with a user's tastes and preferences, typically resulting in a
more effective promotion of products and services. This also means that Web services can usually charge companies more for such tailored advertising, creating greater financial returns. "We don't receive any direct revenue from using NDS-it's all indirect,"
Mullig states. "NDS allows us to do targeted advertising, personalizing it for each customer."
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So in the process of demoing digitalme, CNN said hey here is the app we are working on, what's the engine under the digitalme hood, our database solution is too slow, can you do something. Along came eDirectory --- user authentication, and profile information stored in the directory at CNN so that customized info will pop up on the initial screen. My only question is what did they do about the user login procedure? Do they still store the user id and password in the cookie to allow the user not to have to enter both everytime the visit the site? Or have they replaced the whole thing with an NDS solution that has something else at the front end? |
