4-page Case Study - Posted 1/23/2007
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Leading Recruitment Company Supports Job Seekers with New Database Technology
The online presence of Reed Executive (www.reed.co.uk) attracts millions of visitors each week. The technology that supported it, however, struggled to accommodate additional visitors. Working closely with Microsoft and Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner Attenda, Reed conducted benchmarking exercises to compare Microsoft SQL Server™ running on Microsoft Windows Server® 2000, MySQL running on Microsoft Windows Server 2000, and MySQL running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Server.
After ruling out MySQL and Red Hat, Reed compared SQL Server 2000 and Microsoft SQL Server 2005, ultimately deciding on the latter. The new database infrastructure based on Microsoft SQL Server 2005 has reduced total cost of ownership, increased search performance, and provided ample room to manage future growth of online searches.
Situation
Leading recruitment agencies in the United Kingdom (U.K.) have seen great success in the last decade as the job market continues to enjoy positive growth. Reed is one of the names synonymous with this boom, and the company continues to enjoy a reputation as a market leader.
Since its foundation in 1960 by Alec Reed, the company has grown organically, rather than by acquisition. Today, it boasts more than 3,000 employees and 300 offices across the U.K and Ireland. Since 1995, the company’s traditional office presence has been complemented by its Web site, http://www.reed.co.uk/.
The introduction of the site has created rapid growth in its database of candidate details, job specifications, and other related information. Mark Ridley, Head of Technology for reed.co.uk, says: “reed.co.uk is one of the most successful job sites in the U.K. We receive a large amount of traffic, equating to more than 50 million page impressions a month. More than 250,000 jobs are live on the site at any time. The success of the Web site has certainly broadened the reach of our traditional business.
Increasing job search volumes—often accounting for up to 80 per cent of the overall transactional load—began to overburden the system. The reed.co.uk databases were held on a failover cluster running Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2000. Each database was powered by eight Intel Xeon 3GHz processors and hosted by Microsoft Gold Partner Attenda.
To better handle online search growth and ensure better server utilisation, Reed wanted to develop the site’s search capability and offer even more functionality to its users. It created the Reed New Search project to modernise its IT infrastructure without having to invest in larger and more expensive servers or split up databases.
Reed decided to separate the new search functionality from the main transactional database. This involved the creation of a dedicated search application. Having found a solution to the scalability and performance problems, Reed needed to choose the most appropriate technology to support the new system.
Ridley and his team were given the important job of finding the best business solution. “The team and I were quite pro open-source, and we were interested to see how Linux performed compared to Microsoft, who we were already very familiar with,” Ridley says. “We were determined to find the best solution available to meet our changing business needs.”
Solution
To select the new database infrastructure, Ridley and his team conducted a series of comparative benchmarking tests. The team tested Microsoft SQL Server 2005 running on Microsoft Windows Server ® 2000, MySQL running on Microsoft Windows Server 2000, and MySQL Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advance Server. Testing focused on database performance and metrics, using a presentation layer developed with Microsoft .NET Framework and Microsoft C#®.
“Many Microsoft houses can be evangelical and won’t entertain alternatives,” says Ridley. “Similarly, it’s not uncommon for open source houses to think the worst of Microsoft, with no regard for the quality of the product. We’ve tried to avoid evangelism about one particular product, keeping an open mind about what might be best for us as a company, our employees, and customers.”
Benchmark tests showed that SQL Server 2005 running on Windows was the most viable solution. One of the key factors influencing the technical team’s decision to choose Microsoft was the dependability of Microsoft software. The team wanted a solution that performed consistently and provided timely, reliable service.
“Our traditional recruitment business derives tremendous value from the Web site,” Ridley says. “Essentially, if we don’t have a first class job search, we won’t attract candidates. We lose our hook without job search, and it really is the most compelling part of reed.co.uk for jobseekers. It is for that reason that reliability of our server is of huge importance to us.”
Another major factor influencing the decision to select Microsoft over open source was how Microsoft and open source compared on maintenance.
“SQL Server 2005 is something you can administer very intuitively,” Ridley says. “While I am a big fan of open source products, I have to acknowledge that administering Red Hat and MySQL is an entirely different proposition to the simplicity offered by SQL Server Management Studio.”
After deciding to use SQL Server running on Windows, the technical staff at Reed then engaged with key Microsoft staff to compare SQL Server 2000 and SQL Server 2005 running on Microsoft Windows Server 2003. Tests showed a 20 per cent improvement in “full text indexed” search speeds with SQL Server 2005. The speed of full-text catalogue building also increased, with times in test environment falling from 20 minutes using SQL Server 2000 to just one minute with SQL Server 2005.
Today, the main transactional database cluster is a failover, active/passive pair of HP ProLiant Servers with eight 3GHz Intel Xeon possessors and 16GB of RAM, running Windows Server 2003 and SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Edition. The new search nodes are powered by four HP ProLiant Servers with two 3GHz Intel Xeon possessors running on Windows Server 2003 and SQL Server 2005 Standard Edition. Around 90 per cent of the 1.5 million searches the site processes per month are running on the new search nodes.
The new search infrastructure went live in December 2005 and has delivered a host of benefits to jobseekers, consultants, IT staff, and the company as a whole.
Benefits
The results of Reed’s comparative testing clearly demonstrate the benefits of the latest Microsoft technologies. SQL Server 2005 performed 42 per cent more searches than MySQL running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Server in timed load tests. The findings were similar when it came to speed and processor utilisation. MySQL used 11.7 per cent more CPU time than the Microsoft database and was 7.5 per cent slower when responding to queries.
Continuous Uptime Support for Web Site
As an online service provider, Reed must ensure its site has maximum uptime. Because of the ubiquitous nature of the Internet, people are free to access the recruitment site whenever they want, so reed.co.uk must be reliable and accessible 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
“Since implementing the new database infrastructure, we have achieved 100 per cent uptime for the job search,” Ridley says. “We aim for 99.9 per cent uptime for the whole reed.co.uk application, not just the servers. Microsoft has played a key part in delivering that. Over the years, our level of confidence in products such as Microsoft Windows and SQL Server has grown to the point where we pretty much know those key building blocks are going to be absolutely rock solid. reed.co.uk is reliant on a fast and available job search engine, so we demanded high levels of reliability from the product and it has certainly delivered.
“Our job is to support the business and our customers so everyone who uses the site is totally satisfied with the service. We will always be reliant on our excellent recruitment consultants, but we also need technology that makes their jobs easier and helps them focus on finding the best people for the best jobs.”
Low Total Cost of Ownership
Reed understands the cost of new technology extends beyond just the initial purchase price. Ridley’s team took into account training, licensing, and support costs, in addition to add-on costs such as employee time spent obtaining and deploying upgrades. The company also considered the financial implications of downtime and sluggish operations.
“We already had a great deal of Microsoft experience in-house, but we were completely committed to undergoing a re-skilling exercise if another technology turned out to be the best solution to our problem,” Ridley says. “Ultimately, we felt the additional money we would have to pay for extra servers and management would make any licence savings negligible. We crunched a lot of numbers, and they came out in favour of Microsoft. We have achieved everything we set out to do, and have done so very economically.”
Enhanced Support for Online Business Growth
The benchmarking exercise was a great example of Ridley’s intention not to be swayed by his company’s history of using Microsoft database technology to support the site. “The caveat here was that we were testing things out of the box to see how they ran unoptimised,” he says. “In my experience, Linux and MySQL are products that will run fantastically if you have the time to really understand how to tune them for your particular application. The question is whether or not this offers real value given the time it takes. In the end, Microsoft software and services were proven to be the better solution to our business needs.”
As predicted, at the start of 2006, reed.co.uk received a record number of visits. The new server infrastructure has stood up to the challenge. Since that peak, the database nodes are dealing with around 240,000 queries a day and 1.4 millions job searches a week with, on average, less than 5 percent CPU load.
“Rather than buying twice the capacity we need to still be operating effectively in 18 months, we can provision a new search node and plug it in when our growth demands it,” Ridley says. “We already list more jobs than any of our competitors, but the new system will help us list even more and provide more features that attract job seekers.”
Microsoft Windows Server System
Microsoft Windows Server System is a line of integrated and manageable server software designed to reduce the complexity and cost of IT. Windows Server System enables you to spend less time and budget on managing your systems so that you can focus your resources on other priorities for you and your business.
For more information about Windows Server System, go to: www.microsoft.com/windowsserversystem
For More Information
For further information about Microsoft products and services please visit www.microsoft.com/uk or call 0870 60 10 100*.
For hearing impaired customers with a Minicom contact: 0870 50 30 400*.
*Lines are open 8am-6pm Monday to Friday. Please note Numbers prefixed 0870 will be charged at national call rates. For details of national call rate charges please contact your telecoms provider.
For more information about Attenda products and services, visit the Web site at: http://www.attenda.com/
For more information about Reed Executive products and services, visit the Web site at: http://www.reed.co.uk/
For More information on the Windows Server System Technology please visit: http://www.microsoft.com/uk/windowsserversystem/default.mspx
For more information on the comparison between Windows Server System and Open Source solution: http://www.microsoft.com/uk/windowsserversystem/getthefacts/default.mspx
This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.
Document published November 2006
