Planning for Online Growth

As storage-area networks (SANs) emerged as a viable opportunity for mission-critical enterprises, priceline.com called on Sun Services again, this time to help plan and create a SAN for its environment. Because of its high transaction loads and availability requirements, priceline.com wanted a solution that maximized I/O per second.

Many retailers see their online presence as a potential channel through which they can do more business. They want to maximize operational efficiency and provide integrated customer services between their online and brick-and-mortar storefronts. If you're one of those retailers, you may have questions about where to begin. And you may be worried about scaling up to handle potential needs, security, administrative issues, and the like.

The good news is that help is available. One thing it takes is planning—as many retailers have already found—and industry experts can help you develop your online strategy. Here's a quick look at how one retailer anticipated growth, planned for it, and found success.

Priceline.com processes an enormous volume of transactions—all day, every day—and needed an information system that could meet its aggressive performance requirements. "We knew we were going to have a large customer database, and we knew that the transaction load was going to be tremendous," says Ron Rose, chief information officer for priceline.com, "and we weren't disappointed. We have more than 16 million customers, and during peak periods, we can experience up to a thousand SQL messages per second—a significant velocity."

SAN Boosts Capacity

As storage-area networks (SANs) emerged as a viable opportunity for mission-critical enterprises, priceline.com called on Sun Services again, this time to help plan and create a SAN for its environment (see "What Is a SAN"). Because of its high transaction loads and availability requirements, priceline.com wanted a solution that maximized I/O per second.

"Sun Services architected the redundancy and flexibility we needed into the SAN infrastructure. And we are realizing benefits based on that work. With the Sun SAN, we've got far more capability to move storage around, so we recover faster, thus minimizing our mean time to recovery (MTTR). Our MTTR on database rebuilds for one of our databases went from 20 hours to 1 hour."

The Sun SAN infrastructure also reduced priceline.com's administrative complexity, allowing the company to manage more machines with fewer people, which cut costs. "We believe that the ease of administration of the Sun SAN has reduced our workload by 5 to 10 percent," says Rose.

Planning in Stages

Deciding how to handle huge volumes of transactions was only part of priceline.com's challenge. "We needed to build a high-transaction-throughput site that was secure, never went down, and could scale to support as many as 40 million customers," says Rose. "Our goal was to reach above 'five nines' to achieve 100 percent availability for months at a time while also being able to scale way beyond today's needs."

Priceline.com initially selected Sun Services to devise a strategy that would meet its scalability, availability, performance, and security goals, because it realized soon after launching the business that its NT architecture couldn't scale to meet anticipated growth.

In the first engagement, Sun Services helped priceline.com put together a complete solution of storage, servers, support services, and implementation assistance that met all its requirements. "We initially went with Sun for scalability and for the stability and enhanced security of the operating system," says Rose. Then came planning and implementation of the SAN and its attendant benefits.

Not every retailer is anticipating the number of transactions that priceline.com handles. But with a careful strategy, retailers can start small and grow as their needs change. If you're looking to increase your online presence, a little planning can go a long way, and the plan may incluce a SAN.