Solutions

E-Commerce and Cold Pizza !

Who would have predicted 3 years ago that people would order their favourite pizza over the Internet. Well it may not be happening yet in Europe, but pizzaphiles in the US have been rushing to send in their orders from the convenience of their desktop screens while playing their favourite racing game.

In the eight months since its launch last year, QuickOrder.com – a Chicago based E-Commerce service provider has taken 10,000 orders and routed them to the customer’s nearest Domino Pizza shop. The company is delivering this service to over 300 stores in 15 states.

But think what would happen if QuickOrder’s web server goes down after taking a customer order but before dispatching it to the pizza shop. Where does that leave the hungry customer ? With a cold cheese sandwich, a frown on their face and a determination not to use the service again.

“The competition to online ordering is people ordering over the phone,” says Ray Anderson, president of QuickOrder. “We wanted dial-tone reliability, just like the telephone company offers. We can’t have any downtime. In fact, if a user was on the system and something failed, we wouldn’t want the user to know it.”

What Mr. Anderson was looking for was a web server that could deliver Telco class availability - 99.999% uptime. That equates to around 5 minutes of total downtime in a year !

The Telcos have managed to achieve this with very expensive and proprietary systems that have a very high Total Cost of Ownership (TCO); an option not readily available or justifiable for the majority of E-Commerce sites.

QuickOrder should be the model for any company wanting to take E-Commerce seriously. The fact is that downtime not only costs lost orders, but more importantly it drives customers away to the competition. The internet buzz word these days is 7-24-7. Give a customer a 7 second response time, every hour of the day, every day of the week - or face the consequence of losing that customer. The old adage “the customer is king” is more pertinent in the internet world, since customer loyalty is very thin. What matters is response time and systems that are available every second of the day.

So what system did QuickOrder choose to achieve their availability requirements? Here is Mr. Anderson again “We wanted to have 100% uptime and wanted to stay with Windows NT and found the Endurance array to be the only solution to provide that. We assembled an all star lineup of programmers and management to build and test the initial site, and we realized that we needed an equally robust hardware solution to expand past the test stage. We considered the Endurance product for a while and could not find any other product that was comparable. The alternatives required proprietary hardware and/or software. The Endurance system was ideal for us because we did not need to modify our software.”

The Endurance™ array, from Marathon Technologies, delivers nonstop processing, continuous data access, uninterrupted connectivity, and disaster tolerance, all with constant performance. Using industry standard server components, Marathon’s patented ComputeThru™ technology continues computing through component failures and hot swaps. The No Touch Recovery™ feature automatically assimilates new components into the array, thereby restoring full redundancy, without human intervention. The entire process takes place transparently to users. With the Load ‘n Go™ feature, customers can use shrink-wrapped application software and off-the-shelf Windows NT.

A healthy supply of vitamins...

MotherNature.com, Inc., a leading Internet retailer and information source for vitamins, supplements and minerals and other natural and healthy living products, has also selected and installed Marathon’s Endurance™ array to support its Microsoft Exchange Server. MotherNature.com considers its Exchange Server to be a significant element of its business, as it is used to communicate with its employees, vendors, and most importantly, its customers.

“Unlike most IT organizations, in our business we can easily measure the cost of an hour of downtime and the impact of slow performance,” states Denis Nothern, director of information technology for MotherNature.com. “That simplifies the ROI calculation and makes the decision to use Marathon a no-brainer!”

MotherNature.com found that the Endurance system has exceeded the availability performance of its existing systems, including MotherNature.com’s cluster system. “The Endurance product has provided solid performance – exceeding our expectations. It simply has not failed since it was installed,” adds Nothern.

In addition, MotherNature.com has purchased a second Endurance system and is now planning on replacing its existing database cluster server with an Endurance-enabled system to take advantage of the greater throughput and proven reliability. “All in all, we are very pleased with the results of the Endurance system,” concluded Nothern.

What about Scalability?

Another concern for E-Commerce businesses is scalability of their Internet servers to cope with an increase in user access over the lifetime of the application. This concern has been traditionally addressed by specifying a big enough system that can handle the projected traffic volume from day one. Although large system manufacturers would love you to specify such hardware, in reality it is a costly and inefficient use of technology. The current industry trend is for building a cluster of low cost, industry standard, independent computers that work together as a single system. This can grow to cope with demand by adding extra computers without modifying the existing hardware or software. A solution like this provides both scalability and reliability of available resources since any failure of a single computer within the cluster can be compensated for by re-routing traffic to an alternative system.

An internet server cluster can be built with hardware assisted clustering using HolonTech’s HyperFlow product. This can manage clusters of computers running a web application server in the middle or “application” tier. Each of these servers accesses a database containing information in the back-end or “data” tier. The database typically resides on disk array storage, offering very high reliability. By clustering the application tier servers and by remaining aware of the servers in the data tier, HyperFlow provide these businesses with 100% application uptime and their customers with fast access to available information.

For more information on Marathon’s Endurance array click here.

For details on HolonTech’s HyperFlow product click here.