Egghead gets 7,200,000 hits a month?
240,000 visitors daily = 7,200,000 hits/month
here's the article!!!!!!!!!!!!!!......
InternetWeek
May 18, 1998
Clustering Powers Egghead's New Life Online
Mitch Wagner
System availability is a little more important to Egghead.com than to other companies-after all, its entire business is online.
To maintain high availability for its E-commerce servers, $293.1 million Egghead.com uses Resonate Inc.'s Dispatch and Microsoft Cluster Server. The two products keep Egghead.com's Surplus Direct and Surplus Auction sites up and running for 240,000 visitors daily, says Mark Daly, the company's distributed technologies manager.
Egghead.com used to be Egghead, the software retailer with 280 brick-and- mortar buildings. But competition from the superstores whittled Egghead down to 80 stores, so last year, the retailer decided to shut them down completely and run its business via the Internet and 1-800-EGGHEAD.
The Surplus Direct and Surplus Auction E-commerce sites were acquired by Egghead last year. Surplus Direct sells standard computer products, and Surplus Auction is an actual online auction of surplus computer equipment.
Egghead.com fulfills more than 90 percent of its orders from stock kept in a warehouse in Vancouver, Wash. The remaining orders are drop-shipped from distributors Ingram Micro and Merisel, which Egghead.com communicates with via EDI.
Surplus Direct and Surplus Auction are each configured on a Tandem CS150 server running dual 200-MHz Pentium Pro processors with 1 gigabyte of memory. The Direct server has 8 gigabytes of disk space; the Auction site has 12 gigabytes. The servers are linked using Tandem's proprietary ServerNet connection and run Microsoft Cluster Server. The Tandem servers maintain inventory, fulfillment and other backoffice apps using Microsoft SQL Server software.
But the Tandem servers don't talk to the Web. That job is given to three Worldnet PCs, running dual 200-MHz Pentium Pro processors with 4 gigabytes of hard-disk storage each. The Worldnet servers receive information from the SQL applications on the Tandem servers, inject them into HTML templates and present the resulting documents to the Internet-an architecture similar to many large Web sites that serve up Web pages dynamically.
"The back-end knows the information, but knows nothing about the HTML and HTTP. Almost all the pages are dynamically generated. That puts a lot of pressure on the servers to be sure they remain available," Daly explains.
Resonate's Dispatch software maintains load balancing among the three servers. With data duplicated among the three servers by Microsoft Source Safe, any one of the three can pick up the load from the others if one or both fail. The machines are all connected using 100-Mbps switched Ethernet, using multiple 3Com switches.
Surplus Direct chose Dispatch because most of the competitors it evaluated were combined hardware/software products, meaning that Surplus Direct would have to buy a new box just to handle load balancing as the site grew. With Resonate's software, Surplus Direct can improve throughput simply by adding on a less expensive, and more flexible PC. "As we expect more traffic, we can load up new front ends and put them into the pool," Daly says.
Moreover, other load-balancing software present a single point of failure- if the box that the software runs on crashes, then the entire load-balancing system goes down. But with Resonate, any one of the servers in the cluster can act as the scheduler. For Egghead, that's a good deal.
TOOL BOX
Egghead.com
- Clustering software: Microsoft Cluster Server, Resonate Dispatch
- Web servers: Three Worldnet dual Pentium Pro 200-MHz servers; each has dual processors with 4 gigabytes of RAM
- Server hardware: Two Tandem CS150 servers; each has dual Pentium Pro 200- MHz processors and 1 gigabyte of RAM
- Database software: Microsoft SQL Server loaded on the CS150s
- Web tool: Microsoft Source Safe
- Networking: 100-Mbps Fast Ethernet
Copyright (c) 1998 CMP Media Inc.
|
