1. NWS Internet Farm Technology Robert Bunge Internet Dissemination Officer Office of the Chief Information Officer 10/30/2008

2. NWS Internet Farm Technology NWS operates six web farms  Originally operated independently Consolidating to three farms operated as a single unit as time and resources allow  Silver Spring, MD  Kansas City, MO  Ft Worth, TX

3. NWS Internet Farm Technology Designed to provide 99.9% availability Most content mirrored between the farms Globally load balanced using DNS Each farm locally load balanced  Two caches  10 web servers  NFS servers  Four database servers  Data processing systems

4. NWS Internet Farm Technology Back stopped by commercial content delivery network providers  Two providers on contract  Experience shows each provider serves specific content best, but both work  Both have experienced outages  Increases capacity by a factor of 4 to 50, depending on content type  SOP is to serve from origin farms until demand approaches capacity

5. NWS Internet Farm Technology Farms are LAMP environments  Linux/Apache/Mysql/PHP  Leverage commercial Mysql clustering technology  Home grown Content Management System  Use rsync to mirror content across NOAA WAN

6. NWS Internet Farm Technology Some capacity numbers  Generation of ~200k images per hour  ~1 million forecast “points” updated as needed by local offices – every 1 to 12 hours  Most forecast words generated “on the fly” from raw data  Parsing/processing of 9000+ text products per hour  ~200 units with “websites,” 400+ content providers

7. NWS Internet Farm Technology Example usage  Avg 6 million users per day;  Routinely ranked in top 2,000 websites by Alexa  Spikes to 40-60 million users  1 to 2 Gb/s  Driven by impact and media attention

8. NWS Internet Farm Technology More focus on data services  XML based  RSS/Atom  Common Alerting Protocol  SOAP/Rest services  GIS services  KML  Shapefiles  OGC Web Feature Services

9. NWS Internet Farm Technology 2 nd Generation Interactive Technologies  NWSChat – XXMP based chat between forecasters, electronic media and emergency managers  Google Maps interfaces on NWS web pages  Relieves NWS of map making chores  Improved user interface/more details  Video briefings/training  SMS delivery of warnings/watches

10. NWS Internet Farm Technology Robert Bunge NWS Internet Dissemination Officer Office of the Chief Information Officer Robert.bunge@noaa.gov 301-713-1381 x140