During the 2007 Holiday season, Dell.com projected a 25% surge in business. By using Internet Information Services 7 and Windows Server 2008, they were able to handle this traffic without new hardware investment.
Background
As the 2007 holiday season approached, Dell.com turned to Internet Information Services 7.0, part of the Windows Server® 2008 operating system, for the additional performance and reliability it needed to handle an expected 25 percent surge of business in the last weeks of the year, which historically becomes the new baseline for the following year. Dell.com, the online site of the world’s largest direct-sale computer vendor, based in Austin, Texas, is supported by more than 900 servers, including 30 frontline Web-content servers.
To prepare for the holiday spike, Dell implemented Windows Server® 2008 with Internet Information Services (IIS) 7.0.
Results
With the help of the increased performance and reliability gained from moving to IIS 7.0, Dell successfully handled the holiday surge—which became the “new normal” after the holidays—without adding any additional hardware.
Ben May had a tough decision to make. As an Infrastructure Architect for Dell, May knew that holiday and year-end shoppers would be piling into Dell.com during the last few weeks of the year. Dell.com generated U.S.$16 billion in revenue in 2006, with a 30 to 40 percent spike at the year-end holiday season that the company expected to continue through the following months. "For the last seven years, we’ve hit a spike in the fourth quarter, and that becomes the new plateau for the next year," May says.
May and his team wanted to improve the performance and simplify the administration of the giant e-commerce site to meet the expected jump in holiday demand and the higher volume expected in the following months. The team decided to explore Windows Server® 2008 with Internet Information Services (IIS) 7.0, a powerful Web platform for applications and services that provides organizations with the ability to deliver rich, Web-based experiences efficiently and effectively.
After installing and testing early versions of Windows Server 2008 and IIS 7.0, May did not hesitate to upgrade his most important customer-facing applications to the new software. "Once we realized what IIS 7.0 could do for us, we saw absolutely no reason to hold back,” he says. To prepare for the holiday rush, the Dell systems team decided in October to install IIS 7.0 and Windows Server 2008. “We were done with the implementation by November 15 and from that point, the new systems just handled all the traffic that came at them without any problems at all."
“Once we realized what IIS 7.0 could do for us, we saw absolutely no reason to hold back, the new systems just handled all the traffic that came at them without any problems at all. - Ben May, Infrastructure Architect, DELL”
Dell took advantage of the new configuration management features of IIS 7.0 to help ensure the highest levels of reliability for the new systems. With IIS 7.0, the configuration files for a collection of Web servers can be stored remotely as a single XML file and applied automatically to a set of servers.
In an environment as large as ours, configuration management becomes a serious issue when you have nearly a thousand machines in production with hundreds of applications and databases. The shared hosting and shared configuration features in IIS 7.0 are a huge advantage for us," says May. Shared configuration helps Dell keep all the Web servers in a cluster working on the same settings—avoiding the problems that arise when one server "drifts" away from a standard configuration over a long period. "If something goes wrong, I want it to go wrong on every single machine, not just one server," May says with a smile.
May helped Dell transition from Windows NT® to Windows Server 2000 and again from Windows Server 2000 to Windows Server 2003. He knew how to prepare for such an upgrade. "We did our due diligence before we made the move to Windows Server 2008. We piloted about five applications on Windows Server 2008 and did functional and stress testing. The new servers, with IIS 7.0, provided better performance and response times."
The 30 frontline Web-content servers at Dell.com successfully handled the holiday rush, and now Dell continues to build its future on IIS 7.0. "IIS 7.0 is the new standard. When you visit Dell.com, you’ll be supported by Windows Server 2008 and IIS 7.0," May says confidently.
"With shared hosting, shared configuration, and the improved TCP/IP stack, IIS 7.0 and Windows Server 2008 will be our primary platform for all parts of our e-commerce architecture—from the configurator, where customers choose the features in their hardware, to the shopping carts, all the way through to the finance, billing, and shipping systems," May says.
