The intranet team also stocked the server complex with four standby, or backup, nodes. These are for use during traffic spikes, such as when the IBM masses head to the intranet to get a streamed presentation of Chairman Lou Gerstner's annual address, Bhat says.

And in the last bit of rearchitecting, the intranet team fronted the server complex with an RS/6000 running IBM's Interactive Network Dispatcher IP traffic management software. They knew the software would have no problem doing the job: A four million daily hit count is paltry compared to what Interactive Network Dispatcher has handled out on the World Wide Web.

Interactive Network Dispatcher was used to front end servers at the 1996 Summer Olympics (18 million hits on the busiest day) and the 1997 Masters golf tournament (more than 12 million hits per day). What's more, Netscape Communications Corp. uses the software to handle traffic at its Web site, which gets approximately 40 million hits per day.

On the IBM intranet, all browser requests now come into this server. From there, the Interactive Network Dispatcher software distributes the requests to the appropriate back-end nodes. For example, all requests coming into Port 21 - the FTP port - are forwarded to Node 4, the FTP server in the complex.

Interactive Network Dispatcher's job gets tougher when it comes to distributing HTML requests among the four Web servers - two Domino Go and two Domino 4.5 nodes. It uses a patented algorithm to dynamically distribute traffic according to the available capacity of each server. Interactive Network Dispatcher acts as a "TCP sprayer,'' IBM likes to say.

Within a month and a half of the team's move to this architecture, the number of daily intranet hits skyrocketed to the four million mark at which it is now holding steady. Bhat attributes the surge to the server complex and Interactive Network Dispatcher - the improved performance encourages and facilitates use.

The RS/6000 SP has plenty of horsepower for handling well beyond four million hits per day, Bhat says. He anticipates a rapid increase in hit counts in the next six months as new applications come online.

Across the Big Blue sea

Bhat and his team also plan on bolstering the corporate Web to improve service for global users. For example, they have deployed proxy servers at several international locations so each request isn't being handled by the server complex in New York.

Once a page is requested, it is cached on the local proxy server. Subsequent requests for the same page are handled by the proxy rather than the host server, reducing the amount of time a user waits for the download.

The intranet team also is conducting bandwidth studies to determine the best locations in Europe and the Asia-Pacific region for mirroring the New York server complex. Once the mirrored sites are up, the intranet managers will rely on local routers using the Open Shortest Path First protocol to direct intranet traffic to the nearest mirrored site.

Another Interactive Network Dispatcher feature will kick in once the mirrored sites come online, Bhat says. The software's Interactive Session Support component can balance Web requests among multiple WAN sites.

Establishment of the mirrored sites also makes it possible to publish content in the native language of each site. IBM language translation programs will do the conversions on the fly.

The final major architectural initiative the intranet managers have undertaken is the deployment of IBM/Transarc's DFS, a distributed global file system. DFS's caching feature allows HTML files published on the intranet's main server complex to be replicated immediately to all the mirrored sites.

Intranet traffic from Europe and the Asia-Pacific region will not have to transverse IBM's cross-Atlantic backbone to get to the data stored in the New York server complex.

These intranet-specific efforts are part of a grander scheme for adding WAN connections and large-scale server platforms. Actually, IBM now considers its intranet the real enterprise network because most employees are traversing the corporate Web to get to the information and applications they need for doing their jobs, Bhat says.

Topping that, most new applications in IBM are intranet- or Internet-oriented, so network planning revolves around the Web anyway, Bhat says. Intranet applications include streaming media, threaded discussion groups, Notes discussion groups, live news feeds, people directories, search engines and transaction processing.

In addition to these applications, the intranet team maintains a site for downloading corporate-approved software, such as the Netscape Communications Corp. Navigator browser it licenses, and another for downloading multimedia presentations.

The corporate intranet team registers about one new, full-fledged intranet site per month, Bhat says. That's not too bad for a company mired in Big Iron legacy.

INTRANET INSIGHT

Sandesh Bhat, technical manager and Webmaster for IBM's corporate intranet, is responsible for keeping the snarls out of the company's massive Web. Here are some things he's learned along the way:

1. Pick people with the right skills and expertise, from marketing, technical departments, sales, human resources and other disciplines, to create the team to support your intranet.

2. Build community among your departmental Webmasters. A successful intranet requires strong working relationships among content providers.

3. Begin your intranet planning with scalability in mind. Plan for intranet usage to grow by orders of magnitude beyond original expectations and requirements. Recent studies show that the return on investment for an intranet is directly related to how much it can do. If yours is to be successful, design it with an architecture that will accommodate hypergrowth.

4. Build support for participation among end users, engaging them in the process of determining what resources and capabilities should be incorporated into your intranet. Internet technologies and the Web are agents for change in an organization - be sure to reach out to your end-user community to make sure that your intranet meets their needs and requirements, or else they may not use it.

5. Make sure you have support in the executive suite. Although intranets and Web sites work best when designed and driven by the grass-roots people who live and breathe the technology, be sure that your project has support from the top. Empowerment of the intranet project by company executives is essential to success.