WebMiles turns to Novell caching system
 
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SANDY, UTAH - When WebMiles set out to provide consumers with unrestricted miles redeemable for free travel, the company knew it needed two things to succeed: a service provider/collocation facility to house and run its equipment, and caching hardware that would let WebMiles deliver those rewards as quickly as possible.
"When I came to WebMiles in May, we were a month out from doing a huge nationwide ad campaign," says Brian Holman, chief information officer for the Sandy, Utah, firm. "I did an assessment of the Web site and decided that the design would not be able to scale for the type of traffic it would receive."
Holman decided to strengthen WebMiles' Web infrastructure. He bought a cluster of three Intel-based Quantex servers running Novell's Internet Caching System (ICS) and placed them at service provider Consonus' data center. There the caching servers tie to F5 Networks' BigIP load-balancing servers, which receive requests from the Internet. Consonus is based in Salt Lake City.
"WebMiles has a public site that is static and a site for members where content is dynamic," Holman says. "We use reverse proxy, and with huge traffic spikes Novell's ICS off-loads that traffic. If we had stuck with the Web infrastructure WebMiles had in place, we would have failed miserably."
In the new configuration, the Novell ICS box examines each packet it receives and from the HTTP header determines whether the request is for static or dynamic content. If the request is for heavily used static data such as data sheets, the "brochureware" is served from cache. If the request is for dynamic data, such as images, the ICS appliance passes it untouched directly to one of six Sun Solaris Web servers, at the Consonus data center.
The Web servers in turn connect to application servers running a Java development environment and then to a back-end database. At each point on the way, data and transactions are protected by redundant equipment. Each caching appliance and Web server can fail over for another in the event of problems. WebMiles' Holman is also exploring multisite redundancy to back up Consonus' capability.
"With over a half-million customers, it's important that I never give my customers a busy signal," Holman says. "ICS will serve content from whichever Web servers are up. If there is a failure, ICS will just pull from remaining servers without skipping a beat."
WebMiles is not just using caching technology to speed content delivery to its customers. The company's employees also connect to the WebMiles site via a VPN and an ICS box that gives them the same Internet service as WebMiles customers.
Management of this extended network is split between WebMiles and Consonus, Holman says. He manages the equipment WebMiles owns, and Consonus manages its load-balancing switches and telecommunications equipment. Consonus also manages the power, temperature and humidity controls necessary for running a data center. The data center is fitted with utility-supplied power and diesel and natural gas back-up generation systems, as well as a power conditioning uninterruptable power supply system - a raised floor with redundant cooling and 24-hour security.
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