Web Portals

Scaling and response time issues are on the rise - it is the rare internet user that hasn't been frustrated by a web portal being unavailable or sluggish. For growing your business and eCommerce revenues these problems couldn't be happening at a worse time. It's no secret that enterprises that rely on Web services to drive revenue need to have a means for ensuring SLAs and adequate capacity for all service components - all while controlling IT costs.

This is where Azul Compute Appliances come in.

The Azul solution also offered dramatic improvements in application capacity, increasing trade volumes by 600 percent and significantly reducing response time from 24 seconds to 2 seconds.

Web Portal applications have unique requirements when it comes to scalability and response time. Many portal applications work fine until subjected to some form of "stress test":

• Unpredictable peak loading from seasonal or non-recurring events
• Desire to impose security or fraud protection capabilities
• Too-frequent web portal application restarts due to memory issues

These problems will get worse as web traffic and customer expectations continue to grow. In addition, new eCommerce requirements are emerging that further tax memory and compute resources. How will your web portal applications will react to these trends:

• The growing use of rich-media features like Flash ads and high-resolution, zoom-enabled product photos.
• A drop in overall Website Conversion Rates (orders to visits) to less than 1 in 25
• An increase in the Average Pages Accessed per Visit to more than 13

Business Impact of Scaling and Response Time Problems Attracting and holding the attention of today's on-line customers requires the successful eCommerce Portal to offer increasingly rich product content, while improving its responsiveness and stability. These additional demands for computing resources are only magnified during the double digit surges in peak traffic typical of the holiday season and other peak traffic periods. As summarized by Forrester Research in August 2008:

"The initial focus for customers' experience of Web applications was on availability and response time. There was a widely held belief that an 8-second response time was critical to customer retention. Ten years later, we are using another breed of the HTML protocol, content is coming from diverse sources and is assembled at the client browser level, and advertising is fuelling Web applications. As the technology has become more sophisticated, so have the buyers and sellers. Managing the customer experience is now widely recognized as critical, but it isn't limited to availability and speed. Accuracy of content and Web site usability are increasingly seen as being as important as these initial parameters. All this makes it challenging to maintain the quality of your customer's experience, while minimally impacting the existing hardware systems and portal applications in your data center."

Azul Systems provides an easy to deploy solution for web portal application problems. Click "continue" to read about Azul's solution for web portal scalability and performance issues.

The good news for web portal architects is that these problems can be solved - simply and rapidly. Deploying a single Azul Compute Appliance can immediately solve application reliability, overall transaction throughput and maximum response latency issues.

Azul's Vega™3 Solution Optimized to meet the scalability requirements of typical eCommerce applications, Azul's Vega™3 Compute Appliance delivers massive amounts of centralized CPU processor and memory capacity to mission critical applications built on the Java™ platform. It enables these applications to dynamically scale up to provide contracted levels of service under even the most severe set of peak loading demands.

Massive Capacity With up to 768 GB of directly available memory and 864 separate CPUs, the Vega™3 has the raw capacity to host an individual eCommerce Java application instance supporting greater than 10 times the maximum number of customer sessions achievable using traditional server-only platforms, as well as ensuring consistent service levels even during periods of peak customer-generated demand.

Predictable response times Azul's purpose-built hardware removes the "dead time" imposed on Java applications by every other platform when free memory is collected and defragmented. As a result, existing guarantees on maximum service response and process latency can drop from 100s of seconds to milliseconds, ensuring you meet SLAs regardless of loading.

Customer Proven Azul Compute Appliances help some of the leading web portal in the world ensure their customers receive the best possible experience.

	"Azul appliances boosted our Java application performance in terms of scalability and reduced response times without consuming additional data center space or power." - Jason Pelzer, Technical Director, Limewire

Related Links:

• BSkyB Case Study
• LimeWire Case Study
• Circuit City, LimeWire, and CitiStreet Press Release
• British Telecom Case Study
• Pegasus Solutions Case Study
• TrueCredit Case Study
• Web Portal Webinar

Contact us today at sales@azulsystems.com or call 650.230.6650 to learn how we can improve your business.