Success Story Summary

Company weather.com Industry

Sun Technology and Services Sun Enterprise 420R Server Sun Enterprise 4500 Server Java Technology Solaris Operating System

 
 
 

Executive Summary

The weather is anything but predictable; just ask the flood of daily visitors to weather.com. When hurricanes or severe storm warnings make headlines, tens of millions of people log on to weather.com to track the latest developments. In less than 24 hours, the number of page views on the busy site can jump from 10 million to more than 30 million. Fortunately for weather.com, Sun hardware and the Solaris Operating Environment bring a level of reliability and predictability to areas -- the weather and the Web -- where only uncertainty is certain. Weather.com succeeds because it delivers the information that people want 24 hours a day. So while one visitor might be a weather enthusiast and another a golfer checking conditions at her favorite courses, their expectations -- fast, uninterrupted access to timely information -- are ultimately the same. By harnessing the reliability, scalability, and computing power of the Solaris platform, weather.com can ensure predictable service levels from back-end processing to information delivery, while decreasing associated risks and costs.  

Solaris Operating Environment: Massive Scalability

The forecast at weather.com calls for rapid growth. Every day, 500 Web companies add the weather.com link to their sites, joining more than 200,000 affiliates worldwide already offering their customers access to weather.com forecasts and information. Last year, the number of page views on weather.com hit 3.9 billion, and that number is expected to go even higher this year. In the near future, the company estimates the number of daily page views will jump from 30 to 60 million during times of severe weather.

Thankfully, the Solaris Operating Environment can rise to the challenge. "The scalability and flexibility of Solaris are excellent," says Mark Ryan, chief technology officer at weather.com. "I have over 100 Sun Enterprise servers today and might require 150 or 200 tomorrow. Since Sun is so flexible, I can build the servers quickly and bring them online. We can even switch their functions during lower volume days, taking some servers out of production and using them in a development environment."

The massive scalability of the Solaris platform is critical for managing the continued growth at weather.com. The Solaris Operating Environment scales easily to handle spikes in weather.com traffic and provides a solid foundation for allowing the company to expand its Web infrastructure to handle millions more users and add dynamic, increasingly personalized applications.

 

Reactive Scalability to Manage the Unexpected

The ability to continually add new servers is one advantage of weather.com's use of Solaris software, which gives the company a solid foundation for growing its business over time. However, as is evident by the rapid, unpredictable demands for Web services, it's equally important that weather.com can add or redeploy servers quickly within the Solaris Operating Environment to better manage Web site traffic.

Reactive scalability aids system administrators as they hurry to execute scripts that allow weather.com to respond to a deluge of new visitors. Processes can be moved from one server farm to another to keep Web site traffic flowing freely. This flexibility means staff can scale systems quickly to meet end-user demand for services. At the same time, weather.com can allocate server capacity efficiently and ultimately ensure visitors uninterrupted access to information.

 

Unmatched Reliability and Flexibility with Solaris Software

A homeowner in the path of a hurricane, a gardener in Germany, and a businesswoman in Asia all use weather.com, but for very different reasons. For weather.com, the challenge is to handle peak days when hurricanes rage, while meeting the diverse needs of all the people who regularly visit the Web site. With more than one million page views every hour, the need for flexible, reliable Web services is undeniable.

But before information on ski conditions, air traffic updates, and weather reports for more than 77,000 locations worldwide can be made available, it must be received and processed to reveal the highly relevant content presented on the site. For example, weather.com delivers information tailored to an individual's location and interests; so Web site visitors wanting to ski in upstate New York in January see very different information and ads than a family of four planning their beach vacation in Sydney. Here, too, the stability and availability of the Solaris Operating Environment are essential.

"From a reliability perspective, I can't remember the last time we had problems with Solaris software," says Ryan. "Keeping our systems up and running and receiving information are essential since our data is very perishable. No one cares about yesterday's forecast, but people do expect today's and tomorrow's forecasts to be as current as possible."

 

Standardizing on an Internet Leader

Given the intense demands on its Web infrastructure -- continual data feeds that must be processed on the back end and then delivered in seconds as personalized content to end users worldwide -- weather.com needed a Web platform with a proven record in handling high-volume, rapidly growing companies. As Ryan explains, "The expectations from end users are high and the business demands are so great that you need systems that you can count on immediately."

By focusing core transactions on Sun Enterprise systems, including the Enterprise 4500 and Enterprise 420R servers, weather.com is able to leverage the power of the Solaris platform. With its 64-bit operating environment and multithreaded design, Solaris software offers the computing performance that weather.com needs to keep information flowing to visitors worldwide. Linux servers are used to serve up image content on the Web site.

This set up, referred to by Ryan as a "low and wide" architecture, has improved response times considerably and also reduced the company's overall costs of operations. "Sun hardware and Solaris are known industry-wide for quickly handling large volumes of transactions with few, if any, errors. For that reason, Sun was the obvious choice to support the transactional demand on our site."

Many factors influenced weather.com to build its Web infrastructure largely around Sun hardware and software, including: ease of scaling the Solaris Operating Environment to support future growth; computing power of Sun Enterprise servers; high reliability of the Solaris platform; and seamless integration with proven third-party Web technologies.

The use of Sun hardware and software also gives weather.com ready access to the latest Internet technologies. Because many Internet applications are written and delivered first on the Solaris platform, the decision to standardize core operations on Sun gives weather.com the option of deploying the newest technologies, as soon as they are available.

 

Solaris Interoperability with Leading Internet Systems

To achieve the best operations possible, weather.com carefully evaluated every component of its Web infrastructure. The heterogeneous environment at weather.com includes systems and software from Sun and Oracle, as well as third-party applications from companies such as RealMedia to bring customized ad content to viewers.

Six Sun Enterprise 4500 servers act as database servers running Oracle. These systems, which manage most of the hundreds of millions of transactions that transpire daily on weather.com, are part of a Sun system that includes JavaServer Pages (JSP) technology and more than 40 Sun Enterprise 420R servers.

 

Fast, Platform-Independent Development with JavaServer Pages Technology

To connect information in the Oracle databases with a Web application server, weather.com turned to JSP technology. The platform-independent Java applications speed the delivery of highly relevant content from Oracle to an application server, where it is prepared for delivery to end users. The result is that visitors have rapid access to dynamic content -- and they frequently return to weather.com for more detailed reports.

For developers at weather.com, JSP technology simplified application design by separating page logic from its design and display. In addition, the reusable components in JSP technology support faster and easier management of weather.com applications, enabling developers to leverage today's work in expanded applications in the future.

 

Impressive Performance Gains

Previously, response times to inquiries on the busy Web site could take as long as 18 seconds, an interminable delay for today's Web users. "The longer people wait for information, the better the chance that they'll go to another site," Ryan says. "Our goal was to handle all transactions, even on our busiest days, in less than eight seconds. We ended up beating that, dropping our average response times to under two seconds."

As the backbone of weather.com's Web infrastructure, Sun Enterprise servers and Solaris software not only support inquiries from Web visitors, but also deliver information to PDAs, e-mail addresses, pagers, and cell phones.

"Sun hardware and software let us grow in ways that make sense," Ryan explains. "We can look at the type of information visitors are requesting, determine how it needs to be processed -- simple information delivery or something that requires more transactions -- and then scale systems accordingly."

 

Higher Availability with the Solaris Operating Environment

The delivery of information appears quick and effortless to end users, which is exactly how weather.com wants it to be. The Solaris Operating Environment, in combination with a network management application that Ryan and his team developed in-house, allows weather.com to manage multiple servers as a single entity. This functionality is similar to capabilities in Sun Cluster 3.0 software, something that Ryan is considering integrating into the company's growing system in the future.

"It's a great attribute," Ryan says. "Anytime you can manage servers as a single entity and deal with functions at the application level rather than the hardware level, you get closer to customers. It also means system failures, if they occur, are transparent to end users, so people can get what they came for without knowing something went wrong."

 

Customer Satisfaction Each and Every Time

Concludes Ryan, "When you manage the volume of visitors and information that we do, there are good reasons to go with Sun. With Sun hardware and software, we have scalable Internet systems that minimize our risks of downtime and maximize performance. We also know that visitors get the information they came for, each and every time."

 
Copyright 2004-2009 Sun Microsystems, Inc.