THE MERITS OF SCALABILITY
by Zak Pines
With dreary-eyed politicians and shoppers, the presidential election and
post-Thanksgiving holiday shopping season are overlapping this year for the
first time ever.
Interestingly for the business executive, both items provide lessons in the
importance of scalability of Web-based solutions. Scalable solutions allow for
rapid increases in the number of users for a Website, software, or hardware.
A solution that does not prove to be scalable can be disastrous for a
business, as it can lead to thousands or millions of unhappy customers.
According to Media Metrix, CNN.com had approximately four million unique
United States visitors last Wednesday, five times the number of such users
that it had received only three days prior. News mega-sites such as CNN.com,
MSNBC.com and ABC.com all received huge increases in hits as a result of the
election night drama and ensuing post-election soap opera. Even small news
sites saw spikes in site usage as a result of those seeking local election
coverage.
Various e-commerce enterprises experienced similar record rises in number of
Website visitors last holiday season, and analysts anticipate an increase in
e-commerce activity for the upcoming shopping rush as well.
Both news sites and e-commerce sites had difficulties handling these
increases in activity. Although for the most part, the large news sites
handled the surge in traffic well, there were some glitches. The morning
after the election, MSNBC.com apologized for slowdowns on the site and for
providing links to incorrect or out-of-date stories, a result of the cyber
traffic jamming their system.
Still, the news sites fared considerably better than their e-commerce
brethren last November and December. Not only were there many cases of users
encountering difficulties with the Websites themselves, but there were also
many incidents where orders went unfulfilled and shoppers never received the
items that they had attempted to purchase online.
Scalability has always been an issue in the software and hardware
industries, but its importance has been increased significantly with the
advent of the Internet. In the past, businesses would receive fair warning if
one of their applications was going to receive increased usage from a
customer, and the company could prepare for it accordingly.
In the Internet age, the customers of a Website, whether it be a news site
or an e-commerce site, number in the billions -- anyone in the world with a
Web browser and connection qualifies. Such events as a breaking news story or
product craze can lead to massive increases in the number of users from day to
day, which occurred as a result of the presidential election stalemate.
The technical know-how needed to implement a scalable solution varies on a
case by case basis, but in general a scalable solution is one where a central
server has the capability to access additional servers as required by traffic
increases. The Website developers should also have the capability to increase
the number of servers if estimates for site usage increase over time.
In both this election and holiday season, the scalable Websites will result
in satisfied users -- and business executives -- while Websites that have not
properly prepared for the scalability issues will leave both customers and
executives feeling like a losing candidate who has eaten too much pumpkin pie.
Zak Pines is an Analyst for Virtual Gold Inc, an industry leader in
intuitive data mining software. Pines is involved in developing end-to-end
data mining solutions in various industries. Prior to joining Virtual Gold in
1998, he worked at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center (Hawthorne, NY), from
1995 to 1997. While at IBM, Pines helped develop Advanced Scout, a data
mining program used extensively by coaches of the National Basketball
Association to devise new strategies based on the automatic identification of
hidden patterns in game data and video. Pines is a graduate of Yale University
with a B.A. in economics.
For more information, see www.virtualgold.com
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