Case Study 3: Outsourcing Solutions

The Internet is forcing companies to reevaluate their business strategies in terms of resources, investments, processes, organization, and direction. If there is one common component in commerce today, whether it’s business-to-consumer or business-to-business, it’s that e-commerce must be an integral part of the overall business strategy. The question then becomes: what is the most cost-effective and efficient way for a company to deliver an e-commerce solution? In many cases, the answer is simple (outsource e-commerce to a proven, reliable provider capable of delivering a complete solution), a provider like Digital River, Inc.

The Business Challenge

Digital River, Inc. is a leader in delivering full-service, outsourced e-commerce solutions. It has applied years of research and hands-on practices to develop a complete approach to e-commerce that minimizes the time, cost, energy, and resources required to create an effective e-commerce business. Applying its real-world experience, Digital River transforms the complexity of e-commerce solutions into a three-step process focusing on e-commerce design, management, and growth. From site construction, order management and fulfillment, channel management, customer service, and marketing services, to online reporting and analytics, Digital River offers the complete suite of services that companies require to deploy true e-commerce solutions. Fundamental to the services it provides is the information technology infrastructure that supports the unique requirements of thousands of Digital River clients.

For Digital River to succeed, its clients must succeed. That translates into delivering the e-commerce services, as well as an IT infrastructure that provides maximum performance, and 24 by 7 availability to thousands of clients servicing millions of customers.

Capitalizing on Sun and Oracle Excellence

Understanding the critical role its IT environment plays in its business success, Digital River turned to Sun Microsystems, Inc. Sun is the sole provider of the server and storage technology that drives e-commerce destinations for Digital River’s clients. Digital River has approximately 20 terabytes of Sun StorEdge arrays, including the Sun StorEdge 9960 platform, and a fleet of Sun servers ranging from the Sun Fire 6800 server to Sun Enterprise 6500, 3500, 450, 420R, 250, 220, and Sun Ultra 10 and 2 systems. Since its inception, Digital River has leveraged the advantage of compatibility, scalability, and the unparalleled growth path offered by the Sun server and storage product lines.

IT Built for Performance and Availability

Over the past several years, Digital River’s IT infrastructure has evolved to ensure and maintain maximum performance and availability for its clients. Through that evolution, Sun server and storage technology has prevailed. Currently, access to Digital River’s data center begins with triple redundancy at the ISP level with three DS3s from three tier 1 providers coming into redundant fibre optic rings attached to three individual Cisco routers. The routers connect to a pair of clustered Sun 420R servers running firewall software from Check Point Software Technologies. In the middle tier inside the firewall, load balancers route traffic across eight Sun Enterprise 420R servers. These servers act as Web, Web cache, and application servers running Oracle9i Application Server (Oracle9iAS). All images and downloadable content are stored on a pair of Sun Enterprise 3500 servers connected to 4 terabytes of Sun StorEdge arrays. These servers and storage utilize the VERITAS HA cluster software for NFS. Consistent with its redundancy and high availability infrastructure, Digital River’s third tier, which houses its production database, is serviced by a 20-way Sun Fire 6800 server with two 24-way satellite Sun Enterprise 6500 servers used for real-time database replication. Storage for the mission-critical database environment is provided by a 5.2 terabyte data-center-class Sun StorEdge 9960 platform.

Building, Hosting, and Managing Client Sites

When Digital River first builds a site for a client, there is a lot of content that the client must deliver. Clients transfer this content via one of Digital River’s FTP servers. Digital River, through a series of in-house developed processes, takes the client-supplied images and product descriptions and populates them into the database. A creative group within Digital River then uses this data to build the client’s Web site. In most cases, Digital River is an extension of a client’s corporate site. For instance, the Internet company of Major League Baseball, MLB Advanced Media (MLBAM) is a client of Digital River. If a customer is on the MLBAM-hosted corporate site browsing for something, there may be a “go shopping” button on this site. Once the customer clicks that button, he will actually be redirected to the MLBAM site hosted by Digital River. Because the creative group within Digital River builds a client’s site to mimic the look and feel of the client’s corporate site, the user doesn’t actually know he has been transferred to Digital River. But in reality, all of the shopping cart transaction takes place at Digital River. Once a client’s site has been established, the client is given multiple access points through a number of secure interfaces into Digital River systems to update information and monitor site activities.

Digital River’s implementation is somewhat unique in the industry. Digital River developed its entire commerce application in-house based on open technology. Where it makes sense, Digital River also employs bolt-on applications. The primary commerce application is written in Oracle’s PL/SQL language. This provides tight integration between the databases and the application, and maintains control of the application inside the databases themselves. In addition, Digital River is building additional functionality using Java technology. Because Oracle has a very fast Java virtual machine, the Java pieces can also be stored inside the database allowing Digital River to maintain the same tightly integrated database/application relationship.

Adding to the uniqueness of the implementation is how Digital River builds and maintains its client’s e-commerce operations. Often, companies build Web sites by constructing many static HTML pages. When a change is required, each necessary page is modified. Because Digital River has so many clients and the description of the products change continuously, using static pages would be extremely unmanageable. To resolve this dilemma, Digital River has taken a template approach. It stores all of the content itself in the database. This content is stored once and is thereby accessible to every client that sells a particular product.

Storage that Delivers

Keeping with its Sun/Oracle/VERITAS philosophy, Digital River utilizes only Sun storage products beginning originally with the older Sun StorEdge arrays. As Digital River added more and more clients and started experiencing higher volume traffic, it needed a storage solution that delivered higher bandwidth. Digital River implemented newer Sun StorEdge technology.

While continuing to use its existing storage, a number one priority for Digital River is staying ahead of its performance demands. Along with the server infrastructure, storage plays a vital role. That translates into a major storage requirement in terms of information that needs to be committed to disk in the same amount of time if not faster. To meet the ever-increasing demands, Digital River once again turned to Sun storage technology with the Sun StorEdge 9960 system.

Digital River has realized significant, tangible benefits as a result of moving to the Sun StorEdge arrays. Although Digital River continues to use the Fibre Channel arrays, it has reinforced its production database environment for higher availability and performance with the Sun Fire 6800 server and the Sun StorEdge 9960 storage system. The Sun Fire 6800 server and the Sun StorEdge 9960 system drive the production database with data being replicated in real time to a hot standby Sun Enterprise 6500 server and a second backup Sun Enterprise 6500 server. The new production database environment provides twice the performance and ensures availability in the event of a failure.

Trained for Service and Support

Digital River made the decision to invest in training to enable its engineers to service and support its Sun server and storage systems. This allows Digital River itself to instantly respond in the event of a failure.

Digital River is also taking advantage of the SunTone certification program. Like many service providers, Digital River is making every effort to ensure it is delivering the best possible e-commerce solutions to its clients.

Business Advantages

With regards to high availability and performance, Digital River is committed to 100 percent uptime. It is also focused on high performance. To meet these goals, Digital River has set up the Sun server and storage arrays in high availability cluster configurations. In addition, the Sun Fire 6800 with dual Sun Enterprise 6500 servers for redundancy service the production database. The Sun StorEdge 9960 system, which likewise supports the main commerce database, delivers a significant performance and availability edge with large onboard cache, fibre connectivity straight through to the disk, and an extremely high mean time between failure for the disks. Redundant system components help ensure maximum availability. All of these features combine to allow Digital River to add thousands of new clients without impacting system availability or performance.

With regard to streamlined business operations, Digital River has based its IT infrastructure on two leading vendors, Sun and Oracle. Its philosophy is to stay as close to the originating vendors as possible. Digital River selected Sun and Oracle because these vendors share a common development commitment. Oracle is developed on Sun, and Sun has a tremendous amount of expertise on Oracle. This helps to ensure that Digital River’s IT infrastructure is optimized and based on the latest technologies. It also greatly simplifies integration and administration. In addition, Digital River’s entire IT infrastructure is based solely on Sun servers and storage systems, which virtually eliminates the complexity of mixed vendor configurations. Digital River’s operational environment is supported by more than 15 Sun servers and 20 terabytes of Sun StorEdge arrays.

Positioned for Growth

Digital River’s operational environment employs a methodology of maintaining a 50 percent overhead capacity for its servers and storage. Once a system reaches 50 percent capacity, that system is upgraded through the addition of CPUs, replacement of servers, adding additional storage arrays, or migrating to new StorEdge technology. The combination of faster technology, such as the Sun Enterprise 420R servers, the Sun Fire 6800, and the Sun StorEdge 9960 system, ensure Digital River maintains its overhead requirement. Digital River continues to take advantage of new features and technology offered in Sun servers and storage for higher performance and greater configuration availability. By maintaining a 50 percent overhead, Digital River’s clients are not impacted by performance or capacity issues.