CNN Case Study: Deploying eDirectory ™ in a UNIX Environment Steve Brunton Chief Engineer CNN Internet Technologies

Today’s Agenda Defining “the personalization problem” that dot coms face CNN business and technical personalization requirements Reasons CNN chose Novell eDirectory™ for their solution Testing, implementing and supporting Novell eDirectory at CNN Summary, Q & A

Defining the personalization problem

What Is Personalization? In regards to web services Targeting advertising Customizing layouts Delivering personalized content “You don’t visit a web site, the web site visits you!”

Why Personalization? Increase advertising revenue Build brand loyalty Maintain “stickiness” of browsers Reduce the information overload by delivering only relevant content

Why Use a Directory Service? “The directory has spent the last 10 years in relative obscurity, as a sort of isolated application to generate user phone numbers and user IDs, or buried inside of things like a network operating system….What changed all this was the Internet. What changed it even more than the Internet was the concept of personalization.” — Richard Villars, IDC

CNN business and technical requirements

CNN Requirements Extremely high-performance  Just downright FAST Extremely scaleable  Handle more than 100 web servers with a few directory servers Extremely flexible  Ability to change “how” the data is stored with no service interruption Extremely fault tolerant  On line maintenance, fail-over, repair, determinism (isolationism)

CNN Requirements (cont.) 100% open standards-based  Fully RFC-compliant LDAPv3  Easy to develop to (open SDK) Buy, not build  Shrink-wrap vs. internally developed  No code to maintain internally Cross-platform  Ability to choose best suited OS  Could develop and deploy on different platforms if desired

The Technology Selection Understanding the CNN architecture and design philosophy Understanding the performance and feature requirements Evaluating the requirements against product capabilities Capacity testing

Architecture Philosophy (Simple) HTTP Requests Web Server Queues Application Call Outs

HTTP Requests Web Server Queues Application Call Outs Architecture Philosophy (Scaleable)

The CNN “Challenge”

Performance Requirements 2000 requests per second Greater than 99% success of all requests Less than 250ms latency in the search Load balance all requests Graceful degradation of service  “World event” surge in traffic  More than two million requests in an hour

Feature Requirements Ease of implementation and support  Start to finish in weeks  % uptime to date Suitability to task  The technology matches the job Ability to connect to anything  Via DirXML ™, options are limitless Quality of data  Integrity and speed of replication

Requirements vs. Capabilities Open Standard (LDAP client)  Asynchronous support  Load balancing and determinism Extreme Performance (eDirectory Cache)  Efficient data structure stored in memory and “managed” well Ultimate Flexibility (eDirectory Database)  Prefer hierarchical (XML store)  Very efficient disk reads/writes  Ability to “back out” transactions

Division of Duties CNN  LDAP client Novell Directory engine + Directory cache + Directory database = Novell eDirectory

Testing Novell eDirectory

Novell SuperLab Testing Steps to building the “test”  Find “killer” directory, methodology and testing knowledge Enter Novell Consulting  Find similar architecture to CNN Web Farm (to measure load/performance) Enter Novell SuperLab  Transplant to a pilot on the CNN Web Farm for “real-world” testing Enter Novell Systems Engineering

Novell SuperLab Testing The Test  Fifty NT Workstations running ten processes each of an LDAP query  One single processor NetWare ® Server hosting eDirectory with eight million objects Results  More than 500 requests per second  Less than 60ms latency with 100% hit rate  % CPU utilization until cache warmed— 4-6% after

Implementing Novell eDirectory at CNN

Netscape Web Servers on Solaris (CNN Web Farm) (Cookie) (Thread-safe, load balanced NSAPI plug-in LDAP Client) Novell eDirectory on Solaris Partition R/W Replicas (ad system helpers) InternalFirewall Novell eDirectory on NetWare Development Server Novell eDirectory on Solaris Master Replica HTTP CNN Novell Architecture

Novell CNN “Data Flow” 1. User accesses CNN web site 2. Cookie identifies the user 3. Web Server “looks up” profile from Novell eDirectory via LDAP 4. Web Server uses profile data (XML format) to customize the HTTP stream to the browser and/or make call out to ad injection system

Supporting Novell eDirectory at CNN

Supporting the Solution Backup of the directory  Rely on inherent eDirectory replication  Scheduled export to LDIF Directory maintenance  Automatic Nightly reboots NOT! Remember, we’re running this on NetWare and Solaris!