Error 404--Not Found

The server has not found anything matching the Request-URI. No indication is given of whether the condition is temporary or permanent.

If the server does not wish to make this information available to the client, the status code 403 (Forbidden) can be used instead. The 410 (Gone) status code SHOULD be used if the server knows, through some internally configurable mechanism, that an old resource is permanently unavailable and has no forwarding address.

Building a High Performance, High Availability Internet Infrastructure for E-tail Sites.

Ensuring Happy Holidays for Your Site

Although the catalogs are already in the mail and retail’s biggest rush is upon us, there is still time to set up your e-commerce site to handle the onslaught of holiday shoppers. Careful, comprehensive planning can be the key to making sure your online storefront exceeds your sales goals without experiencing any of the business casualties associated with high-profile outages, sluggish customer service, or unreliable sales transactions.

Resonate provides Internet Services Management (iSM) software and services solutions that maximize service levels of e-business applications to ensure optimal user satisfaction. It is the only iSM solution that monitors and controls the entire e-business infrastructure—the network, systems and applications—and then takes real-time corrective action to ensure high availability and predictable performance. Resonate’s products have been deployed in some of today’s most demanding, mission-critical, e-commerce environments. The common requirement of all of these customers is the need for high availability and performance 24 hours a day. Resonate has proven its ability to support e-business and mission-critical applications through its products and services, that is why customers choose resonate to position themselves for long term success.

We offer the following insight and considerations to allow you to leverage our experience in building a robust, reliable, e-commerce service. Equipped with a good plan and the right information, you’ll be able to tune your architecture and create a shopper-friendly site that will be a hit—not a crash—this holiday season.

What does it take to keep your site up and running? Here are some items to consider:

Fairly or not, customers see your site as your company. All businesses recognize that sites need to be accessible around-the-clock, not just most of the time. With a goal of "99 percent" uptime, for example, you are saying your business can accept almost a full workday of downtime each month. Is that realistic? Compare the cost of downtime with the cost of designed-in redundancy and reliability. Your availability goal will determine not only how much you invest in your site infrastructure, but will also affect your architectural design and the selection of management tools.

The vast majority of established e-commerce sites dedicate servers to a specific function, resulting in a multi-tiered structure that incorporates separate Web, application, and database servers. This architecture lets you implement the type and number of servers appropriate to availability requirements, as well as to the function and load expected at each tier. Such a design also makes it easy to modify one tier without impacting adjacent tiers or, in the event of a failure, to re-direct traffic loads to other servers in the system. In contrast, combining multiple functions on a single system makes it difficult to add or change resources without negatively impacting responsiveness or even rendering the site temporarily unavailable while you make the needed changes.

Once your multi-tiered structure is established, you will need to implement a traffic management solution that efficiently and reliably directs traffic among the multiple servers. This will ensure that site services are available independent of the health or capability of any one server. As a software-only solution, Resonate Central Dispatch™ eliminates single points of failure and does not require dedicated hardware. It also supports on-the-fly additions or reconfigurations.

A redundant, geographically distributed architecture is the starting point for establishing mission-critical availability. Without it, your site is susceptible to beyond-your-control events such as power outages or overloaded local ISP services. Resonate Global Dispatch™ software provides traffic management and service protection across multiple geographical sites or points of presence (POPs).

First and foremost, make sure your traffic management solution services your customers’ requests, automatically directing them around unavailable nodes and shielding them from any component failures. A management tool like Resonate

Commander™ not only monitors site health, it also provides policy-based, automated site control to ensure quick action that will keep system problems hidden from your customers. A historical statistics function can help you spot potential problem areas and fix them before they affect site availability.

No matter how interesting your displays or how hot your product, not even the most loyal of customers will wait out sluggish service. Whether they need more information, or want to make a purchase, online customers expect fast responsive service.

What transaction volume do you expect? And how fast do you expect to respond to each type of transaction? Make sure you are thinking from the customer perspective—if your customers expect to complete a transaction in 5 to 10 seconds, 60 seconds will seem like an eternity. If you want to be able to handle 1000 transactions per minute, you have to build your system to handle at least that volume. Generally most sites should be able to handle expected volumes while running at no more than 50 to 60 percent of the system capacity.

Typically as a system gets busier with increasing transaction volume, responsiveness starts to get sluggish. But while there may be graceful performance degradation up to 75 or 80 percent of capacity, above that level we’ve seen sudden catastrophes that have driven response time to infinity. The most responsive, successful e-commerce organizations invest in enough equipment to run at steady state of 60 to 80 percent of capacity—or even below if they can afford it. Resonate software can keep track of hits to specific areas of your site to help you accurately measure and analyze traffic patterns so you can plan ahead.

If you set up redundant systems, make sure you take full advantage of available hardware resources. For true redundancy, you could run one server, for example, at full capacity, and leave a second server in stand-by mode. But that is more than likely a waste of capital for most budget-conscious e-commerce sites. A more economical design would be to distribute the load across all available servers, using your traffic management solution to manage individual server load and network resources. Depending upon the level of risk you can tolerate, you can in many cases use redundant hardware to augment capacity—just bear in mind if you run two systems, each at 75 percent capacity, you won’t have enough spare capacity in the event of a total failure of one system.

As you evaluate traffic management systems, make sure you don’t give up needed business functionality to maintain site performance. Resonate’s Central Dispatch software has been benchmarked at a record 12 gigabits per second throughput and greater than 72,000 hits per second (the highest in the industry). And most importantly those numbers were achieved using off-the-shelf software with a full set of essential business features like SSL persistence for e-commerce shopping carts.

When a customer has money in hand, it’s in everyone’s best interest to help them make that transaction quickly and accurately. Here are a few things that will assist in this process:

If you see that you have already exceeded traffic forecasts in October, take action then, not later when your customers are experiencing frustrating slowdowns. With integrated real-time feedback, Resonate Commander lets you know exactly what your site visitors are doing. That information is critical to both capacity planning and collecting marketing intelligence. Resonate products also interface with popular third-party solutions to allow more fine-grained monitoring of specific application and database environments. These tools help you focus on specific areas to improve, without having to broadly add resources to services that may not need them.

Be prepared for dramatic changes that might affect how you distribute your resources so that you can have a plan in place to match resources to requests. For example, while most of your visitors might be browsing through content in early November, by late November they may have switched to filling shopping carts and checking out. That’s when you need to beef up your SSL services, possibly by utilizing some of the resources that are no longer needed for serving content. One extra tip—make sure that your traffic management solution offers robust usage metrics and load balancing/availability features, without creating bottlenecks of its own. Resonate traffic management functions place negligible load on your servers and scale linearly to let you take full advantage of each server added to the system.

Server traffic re-direction helps on the server capacity side, but only for those things that can be replicated and balanced, like Web servers (your HTTP traffic) and some application servers. Usually database servers cannot be easily duplicated so that’s where you want to invest to get as much performance from a single system as possible. Your backend systems (such as transaction processing systems) are generally the most stable of all systems and are also probably where you want to maintain state information for handling secure SSL transactions. SSL encryption places a substantially larger load on CPUs than does normal http traffic, so you might consider implementing an encryption accelerator. Integrated encryption accelerators (plug-in boards) can deal with other protocols such as the Secure Electronic Transaction (SET) suite developed by Mastercard and Visa to enable electronic wallet transactions. Leveraging our joint-solutions with encryption accelerator suppliers nCipher or Rainbow Technologies, Resonate can integrate the accelerators into our traffic management realm.

Unfortunately, e-commerce sites are not immune from those post-holiday returns and exchanges. To maintain your reputation as a customer-focused site, you will need to design your infrastructure to efficiently handle those transactions in a way that will encourage shoppers to continue to visit your storefront, even after the holiday rush.

Resonate software allows you to easily add or move components around as needed, so you don’t waste resources in less active areas while popular parts of your site go hungry for capacity. If you design your site to direct specific types of transactions to certain ports or virtual IP addresses, you can easily re-deploy server resources or even temporarily bring in systems from other areas. This capability makes it easy to handle a seasonal shift in traffic such as one from heavy purchasing transactions to an increased volume of customer service requests.

Have a plan for adding servers to handle new customer services or increased traffic so you can take advantage of it when it comes. Think through questions such as: where will you get the systems, what will be the configurations, who will install them, and how long will it take? Whatever your plan, the Central Dispatch solution can help you more quickly integrate resources into your network. As your infrastructure scales across multiple sites, Global Dispatch lets you further distribute the load and even makes your site less susceptible to regional ISP connections or WAN congestion. As an integrated solution, the Resonate software suite lets you leverage all available resources, without adding to the complexity of managing expanding heterogeneous infrastructures.

Thoughtful planning combined with the best traffic management solution can help you parlay your successful retail business into a profitable e-commerce venture. Wherever you can, take advantage of the experiences of other successful companies.

Resonate Central Dispatch enables multiple Internet servers to act as a single, scalable, reliable, and easily managed, e-commerce site. Servers in a Central Dispatch site are accessed via one or more virtual IP addresses and appear to shoppers as a single Internet site. Servers can be co-located (on one or more IP subnets) or distributed geographically, providing support for heterogeneous NT/UNIX environments, multiple departmental networks, and firewall architectures. Content can be replicated on multiple servers for highest availability, segregated by type (e.g, CGI scripts for registering shoppers, product image graphics files; HTML content pages, etc.) or by subject (e.g., */registeredshopperlogin/*) to minimize response times for client requests.

For more information about Central Dispatch:

Resonate Commander helps professional site managers ensure a responsive client experience by providing increased visibility of and control over multi-vendor network resources. Commander monitors multi-tier resources and site performance, maintains historical data for trend and performance reporting, and enables automated responses to correct problems before they impact site resources. Commander facilitates set-up of a variety of tests, including host, service (e.g., HTTP, SSL), as well as specific URL tests for checking availability of critical site content.

For more information about Commander:

Global Dispatch provides an elegant Internet traffic management solution that maximizes the use of available server resources across multiple physical points of presence (POPs). Simple to set up and use, Global Dispatch software considers such metrics as client/server latencies, real-time server activity levels, and server availability to intelligently direct client requests to the best-suited network POP.

Integrated Advanced Traffic Mapping™ features optimize performance, support applications across multiple POPs, and minimize WAN traffic costs. Global Dispatch easily accommodates on-the-fly additions or modifications of resources and offers virtually unlimited scalability for fast growing, e-commerce sites.

For more information about Global Dispatch:

Resonate is a registered trademark, the Resonate logo, Keeping E-Business Open for Business, Resonate Central Dispatch, Global Dispatch, and Resonate Commander are trademarks of Resonate, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. Copyright © 2000 Resonate, Inc. 12/00 WP909.