Utilizing NDS eDirectory for Personalising Web Content: CNN Interactive Case Study

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Utilizing NDS eDirectory for Personalising Web
Content CNN Interactive Case Study

• David Guest, Senior Consultant
• dguest_at_novell.com
• Novell UK

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Todays Agenda

• Defining the personalisation problem
• CNN business and technical requirements
• Reasons CNN chose NDS eDirectory
• Testing, implementing and supporting NDS
  eDirectory at CNN
• Questions and answer

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Defining the personalization problem
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What Is Personalization?

• In regards to web services
• Customizing layouts
• Targeting advertising
• Delivering specialized content
• As Eric says, You dont visit a web site, the
  web site visits you!

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Why Personalization?

• Build brand loyalty
• Maintain stickiness of browsers
• Reduce the information overload by delivering
  only relevant content
• In the words ofsomeone?
• Turn lookers into bookers and
• Browsers into buyers

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CNN business and technical requirements
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CNN Requirements

• Extremely high-performance
• Just downright faaast
• Extremely scaleable
• Handle more than 60 web servers with many fewer
  than 60 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)

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CNN Requirements (cont.)

• 100 open standardsbased
• Fully RFC-compliant LDAP v3
• 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

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The reasons CNN chose NDS eDirectory
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The Technology Selection

• Understanding the CNN architecture and design
  methodology
• Understanding the performance and feature
  requirements
• Evaluating the requirements against product
  capabilities
• Capacity testing

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Architecture Philosophy
Call out application queues
Web server queues
HTTP requests
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Personalization Design Philosophy
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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

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Demand for Ultimate Performance

• Since CNN needed absolutely EXTREME performance
  and scalability, they chose to deploy on Windows
  NT/2000

• NOT!

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Other Feature Requirements

• Ease of implementation and support
• Start to finish in weeks
• 99.999 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

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Requirements vs. Capabilities

• LDAP client
• Asynchronous support
• Load balancing and determinism
• Cache
• Efficient data structure stored in memory and
  managed well
• Database
• Prefer hierarchical
• Very efficient disk reads/writes
• Ability to back out transactions

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Division of Duties

• CNN
• LDAP client
• Novell
• Directory engine
• Directory cache
• Directory database
• NDS eDirectory

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Testing NDS eDirectory
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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

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Novell SuperLab Testing

• The test
• 50 NT Workstations running 10 processes each of
  an LDAP query
• One NetWare Server hosting eDirectory
• Results
• More than 500 requests per second
• Less than 60ms latency with 100 hit rate
• 98-100 CPU utilization until cache warmed4-6
  after

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Implementing NDS eDirectory at CNN
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CNN NDSArchitecture
(ad-injection)
Netscape WebServers on Solaris (CNN Web Farm)
(Cookie)
HTTP
(Thread-safe, load balanced NSAPI plug-in LDAP
Client)
Internal Firewall

• NDS eDirectory on NetWare and Solaris
• Development Servers Only
• - 1 Compaq 1850R
• - 2GB RAM/72GB RAID 0
• 1 Intel Pro/100 Server Adapter
• 1 SUN Sparc
• Solaris 2.6

• NDS eDirectory on NetWare 5 (NDS Farm)
• 4 Compaq 6400
• - 2GB RAM/72GB RAID 0
• - Intel Pro/100 server adapters

• NDS eDirectory on NetWare 5
• Staging server to load batches
• 1 Compaq 1850R
• 2GB RAM/72GB RAID 0
• - 1 Intel Pro/100 server adapter

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Supporting NDS eDirectory at CNN
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Supporting the Solution

• Backup of the directory
• Legato across the wire to Solaris
• Directory maintenance
• Automatic
• Regular rebootsNOT!
• Rememberwere running this on NetWare and Solaris

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Questions and AnswersRules and Boundaries

• Fair game
• Why we did what we did
• What would you do differently
• Why didnt you...
• Off limits
• More architectural details
• Pricing details
• Stupid questionsjust kidding ?

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