"The Network is the Computer." ” Sun Microsystems advertisements for the last several years This chapter looks at the design aspects of high-volume Web sites ” especially those based on WebSphere and Lotus Collaboration tools. IBM's experience designing the Web sites for the Olympic Games, which included Domino for collaboration, will serve as a way to give the history of the evolution of these Web site design concepts. Many of the design concepts for high-volume, high-availability, high-profile sites that included collaboration features went through the intense proving ground of Web sites for the Olympics and other international sporting events. IBM and other computer services companies have long hosted Web servers on the Internet for corporations as part of "outsourcing" agreements. For example, IBM hosts the information Web site for the New York Stock Exchange at www.nyse.com and the transactional Web site for Victoria's Secret woman 's underclothing on-line sales at www.victoriassecret.com. Both of these Web sites are very high-volume, high-profile sites, and the customer in each case needs to know details on any problems with the availability of the site in addition to the details on the use of the site (number of "hits," hotspots, network bandwidth required, etc.). Detailed "data mining" on the use of a Web site is often included as part of the outsourcing agreement. However, there are two new aspects of Web services that companies such as IBM are starting to offer. These are in the areas of "collaboration" services and "on demand" options. The need for collaboration services has been driven largely by the significant growth in Web commerce between companies or business-to-business (B2B) commerce. B2B commerce requires much greater need for relationships and collaborative technologies (such as Web conferencing, instant messaging, and Web teamrooms) to facilitate purchasing for large, complex transactions between teams of people. Also sites with just transactional capabilities are realizing that they could increase the amount and frequency of purchasing by assisting transactions. On demand services allow companies to pay for only the amount of computing power they use (as you would pay for electricity from the power company). On demand computing allows companies to immediately and automatically ramp up power to their Web site during required periods (e.g., the Christmas season or after advertisements at the U.S. Football Superbowl for a site such as Victoria's Secret). This chapter will discuss the design of high-volume Web sites along with new features such as collaboration and on demand options ”all of which can be implemented with WebSphere and Domino systems. Often the experience gained as a best practice for solving the problems of high-volume Internet sites carries over to Internet sites of all sizes. For example, the use of hardware SSL accelerators to offload the encryption function from your high-volume Web servers is usually a good idea even when you only have one moderate size Web server. Hardware SSL accelerators can usually handle at least 10 times the SSL sessions that can be handled by a general purpose Web server, so it's a simple way to allow for significant scalability for your Web server ” even when you're just starting out. IBM's high-volume sport Web sites make use of both WebSphere and Domino, with many WebSphere and many Domino boxes. However, the IBM lessons learned using WebSphere and Domino together for these large sport Web sites carry over to Web sites of almost any size . |
