COMPANIES: Ecommerce, Inc. + Vizuri
CATEGORY: Red Hat and JBoss Outstanding Open Source Architecture
INDUSTRY: Web hosting and Ecommerce Services
GEOGRAPHY: Headquartered in Columbus, Ohio
BUSINESS CHALLENGE: Remove proprietary vendor limitations imposed by web hosting software providers, enhance end-user customer service, and establish a revolutionary intelligent web hosting datacenter infrastructure to meet exponential growth in the business and revitalize a stagnant industry
SOFTWARE: Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform with integrated virtualization, clustering, and file system technologies, Red Hat Satellite, Red Hat Directory Server, JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, JBoss Seam, JBoss Messaging, JBoss Business Rules Management System (BRMS), EnterpriseDB, Hyperic
HARDWARE: HP EVA 8400 SANs and c7000 Blades (BL260/280).
BENEFITS: Developed an Intelligent Datacenter web hosting platform that redefines the current industry landscape, increases customer service, reduces customer turnover, reduces operational costs, and increases system reliability
Ecommerce, Inc. is a global organization working toward developing and deploying new content delivery services to meet the ever-growing demands of modern life. The company has focused on the hosting and ecommerce services markets, diligently seeking to strengthen future growth by focusing on superior customer service and the introduction of new and innovative service offerings.
With a sound customer base of a several hundred thousand individuals and businesses from around the globe, Ecommerce hosts more than half a million domains on their current infrastructure. The company was built on the foundation to leverage technology to break new grounds with a determination to become the premier player in the web hosting and ecommerce industry, delivering consistently solid performance and exceptional growth.
The web hosting industry is at a defining turning point caused by the rapid acceleration of the Internet and the increased demands for web hosting services and changing customer dynamics. In web hosting the provider is generally responsible for managing servers, installing server software, security updates, technical support, and other aspects of service.
The current infrastructure is increasingly difficult to manage and customer demands for new services have increased dramatically. Just three years ago, an average customer may have required hosting for two websites that used approximately 500 megabytes of data and limited features, whereas today, the same customer may require resources for hosting for six websites, three gigabytes of data, and heavier resource constraints on the servers. At the same time, the web hosting software industry has not kept up with new offerings that would increase the utilization and capacity of the servers or improvements in service or features for end users.
With the exponential growth of the Internet, the existing web hosting platforms have not adequately scaled to handle the dynamic performance requirements thereby increasing the number of servers required in datacenters. With a large number of machines in the infrastructure, and hundreds of customers physically tied to a server, creates an environment that is fragile. If any server goes down it could result in potentially hours of downtime and a high number of unsatisfied customers that can lead to increased customer turnover.
"When you have 15,000 customers on a hundred servers, that works, but when you have more than a few hundred thousand customers on more than 1,000 machines, issues will arise and customers will experience outages," said Rick Gideon, vice president of Systems Operations, Ecommerce, Inc." At that point, hosting companies are always chasing fires and handling customer issues, and that takes time away from more value added customer services, which is a main reason why many in the industry experience a customer turnover rate upwards of 20-30 percent."
Some of the web hosting customers either go out of business, but a lot of the turnover is a direct result of customer dissatisfaction. Customers constantly switch hosting companies with a goal to find a stable service, but unfortunately, they experience the same customer support issues over and over again. This high rate of turnover affects the financial bottom line of all hosting providers.
The hosting industry is based on a commodity product that is experiencing decreasing revenues per customer due to the fact that every web hosting provider essentially offers the same service. The end-user is not getting the level of service that they need and web hosting business owners are becoming dissatisfied as they see their revenues diminishing while the license fees are increasing and the technology stagnating due to the limited number of solution providers.
With customers requesting better reliability, enhanced easy-to-use features, coupled with an industry need for the ability to scale up dynamically, Ecommerce identified an opportunity to take a market-leading position. It would create a new hosting-services infrastructure to meet the customer and industry demands while also fulfilling the internal needs for low costs and high manageability.
"We decided to take the lead and develop a revolutionary platform from top to bottom, that enables our continued growth and provides the ability to scale our infrastructure without throwing hardware at the problem," said Gideon. "We were not going to be satisfied with a solution that could handle another 500,000 domains, we wanted to create a platform with the ability to scale to millions of customers and the opportunity to grow our business well beyond the traditional web hosting services available to consumers today."
In the fall of 2008, Ecommerce was introduced to Vizuri, a Red Hat Advanced Business Partner, and the two companies began strategizing on how best to design an innovative offering that aligned the technology needs and business drivers to meet the long-term vision of Ecommerce's goals for the new platform.
"As we worked together on the new platform, it was important that our team at Vizuri, understood the overarching business drivers and approached the project from a business perspective. We needed to understand their current limitations and strategic direction. We relied on Ecommerce to provide the hosting industry background and know-how," said Joe Dickman, managing director, Vizuri. "This allowed us to make the technology solution recommendations that would meet the new dynamic platform's requirements."
At the core of the new infrastructure, Ecommerce wanted to use server virtualization technologies to reduce the number of physical servers required, while increasing the speed and ease of setting up new environments for customers. The use of Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform with integrated virtualization would enable Ecommerce to run multiple environments simultaneously and increase server utilization.
"We selected Red Hat Enterprise Linux for its reliability, established support benefits, low costs, and integration with JBoss Enterprise Middleware. Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform offers the value of not only the operating platform, but also integrated virtualization, clustering, and file system technologies," said Gideon.
In order to create a scalable and flexible new hosting environment for its customers, Ecommerce elected to establish a new technology platform vs. replacing the more than 1,200 physical servers running Windows and Linux. The HP Blade systems coupled with a Storage Area Network mixed physical and virtual servers running Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform with integrated virtualization. Ecommerce will utilize Red Hat Satellite to simplify the management of the mixed physical and virtual environment and for updates to critical patches that identify bugs or flaws. In addition, Red Hat Directory Server was implemented for service delivery and to provide a common look and feel across all of the platforms and a centrally mounted home for System Admins, which ensure availability of all systems tools, no matter where they log-in.
As a hosting provider, Ecommerce is judged by customers on its ability to provide a service that is secure, stable, scalable, and available. Moreover, the company is under constant pressure to keep pricing competitive and to introduce new features for customers. With Red Hat Enterprise Linux running as physical and virtual servers on the HP architecture, Ecommerce can provide enterprise-class services at the right price for customers.
The Intelligent Datacenter's hosting program control panel and overall system management is based on JBoss Enterprise Middleware.
At the entry point, Ecommerce is using JBoss Seam as a control gateway for adding commands for users. Typical tasks include adding websites, editing website settings, adding/editing mail accounts, or tweaking database settings. JBoss Seam will accept the commands and apply a security platform that ensures the commands are being received properly and from authorized users. JBoss Seam also provides flexibility in receiving those commands as it features a Web 2.0 user interface. In this case, Ecommerce will provide its end-users with flexibility in regards to the control panel interface by offering customers a rich environment based on Adobe Flex, in addition to that of JBoss Seam.
The solution will also use JBoss Messaging to pull commands that come into the infrastructure in a decentralized federated fashion; pulled by agents on various servers that can handle customer requests. This allows, Ecommerce to have complex business logic decisions constantly being processed dynamically across all systems and not in a central hub.
The Intelligent Datacenter will also use JBoss Business Rules Management System (BRMS) that will dynamically determine what nodes are down in the cluster and automatically load balance other servers to redistribute the cluster.
The new solution will rely on Hyperic, a JBoss partner, that provides open source system and network monitoring application software. Hyperic will be used to monitor, track, and provide metrics that JBoss will use for faster problem identification and correction. Hyperic will pull all the metrics and Ecommerce will extract the data and feed it into JBoss Business Rules Management System (BRMS). JBoss BRMS will evaluate the metrics of the activity in the environment. BRMS will then define rules and commands back into the JBoss Seam command systems to reallocate or move services to specific servers that are being enabled by Red Hat Cluster Suite, which increases the flexibility of the infrastructure.
"Running the Red Hat and JBoss solution with the metrics provided by Hyperic, allows each customer's applications and data to be completely isolated from the rest, and we can easily allocate computing resources between the different partitions as patterns of demand change," said Gideon.
Ecommerce plans to utilize EnterpriseDB, a leading provider of open source relational database management system (RDBMS) for consolidation of its control panel offerings. Ecommerce currently has eight instances of control panels. Most existing control panels like H-sphere, can only handle a limited number of customer accounts effectively. As Ecommerce discovered over the years, a larger customer base (hundreds of thousand sites) creates many less-than desirable problems. Ecommerce realized it needed to consolidate all of the information across the eight H-sphere implementations into one. The benefit of this is providing an integrated robust, database platform with the needed scalability for robust customer data.
"The Intelligent Datacenter based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform with integrated virtualization, clustering, and file system technology, will be tightly integrated with JBoss Enterprise Middleware, Hyperic, and EnterpriseDB, to create a wildly dynamic, easily managed and intelligent system, that will free Ecommerce from the current industry constraints," said Gideon.
The Intelligent Datacenter and new web hosting solution based on Red Hat and JBoss technology will provide Ecommerce, its customers, and industry partners, a technology platform that will provide the scalability and reliability it has been seeking. Due to the new dynamic nature of the platform, Ecommerce can wall off suspended or broken hardware, meaning the company will never have to worry about the hardware or operating system failing, a true "lights-out" platform.
"The value of the Red Hat business model has provided us with the reliability and security of an enterprise partner," said Gideon. "We are putting millions of customers on the Red Hat-based infrastructure, and having the confidence in Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss Enterprise Middleware to integrate seamlessly into our platform provided us the ability to scale for unlimited growth opportunities. The attention and care that Red Hat provides to its customers is truly enterprise-class."
Ecommerce has invested in Red Hat Support, HP Blade servers, and storage area networks, and the general cost of the solution, but the return on investment (ROI) of just the enhanced reliability with true 99.999 percent availability, will provide Ecommerce with an immediate increase in revenue due to the reduction in churn. Customers that are accustomed to service issues and outages would no longer be continually switching hosting providers and would become more sticky.
"If we could reduce our customer churn by half, it would result in millions in positive revenue gain in the first year alone and the solution would be paid for almost immediately," said Gideon. "By achieving 5-9's, our cost of attracting customers is reduced by increased reputation and reliability, and we could focus our attention on attracting new customers, enhancing customer service, and developing new products and services to differentiate ourselves further."
Since the system can react to and optimize resources with Hyperic metrics and BRMS fine-tuning, the environment would no longer be constrained by customer or system size limits.
"The system reacts to variables and improves operating costs dramatically, if we have a certain number of resources that are no longer needed, they can be powered off and then back on when needed," said Gideon. "In a large datacenter with thousands of servers, having the ability to shut down servers at night will result in tremendous operational cost savings and environmental benefits." In addition to the optimization, server consolidation from 1,200 down to 250 or less will drastically reduce the cooling and power costs in the datacenter.
"Moving from 37 racks of space down to under 10, we are cutting our datacenter space by two-thirds and allowing for further business growth," said Gideon. "The 10 racks will be able to host twice as many web sites, thus increasing efficiency dramatically."
In addition to the direct benefits of cost savings, reliability, and scalability, Ecommerce's end customers will see the most distinct benefits.
The hosting provider customer relationship is quickly changing, as many more companies are looking at ways to have a larger online presence to grow their business and require greater ease of use and more data capacity from hosting providers.
"The current hosting infrastructure is very harsh and crude from the perspective of the average customers, with FTP-this, and setting up POP3-that," said Gideon. Web hosting providers with legacy infrastructure and a tight pricing model, currently devote their limited resources to maintaining and strictly keeping operational.
"Our new Intelligent Datacenter will allow us to refocus and educate our customers and help them in a more strategic manner, and allow us to develop new products and solutions that further our customer relationship and commit the customer to Ecommerce," said Gideon.
"With a truly reliable hosting solution, new and exciting products and solutions, customers will be happy and stay. Churn is reduced, bottom line is increased, and satisfied customers will benefit us with word of mouth promotion. There is simply no one else who can offer our solution, it does not exist," said Gideon.
Not only will Ecommerce and its customers benefit, the company feels the Intelligent Datacenter will revitalize the entire hosting industry. Due to the commodity nature of the industry, small and mid-sized hosting providers are being acquired or generally struggling.
"We are looking to provide our solution to other providers who are currently in our position and desperately looking for a new and reliable platform," said Gideon. "We are exploring a license or hosted approach for providers to use our platform so they can focus on enhanced customer service. It is a win-win approach for our competitors, customers, and partners.
This positioning will allow Ecommerce to provide real value to the industry, not simply that they own equipment or pay for power and bandwidth, but the ability to deliver a service that no other hosting provider can provide.
"We saw that, not only would this enhance our own customer base, but also give us the ability to grow, and grow rapidly, as we could address the issues rampant in our industry," said Gideon. "With the solution based on Red Hat, JBoss, Hyperic, EnterpriseDB, and the partnership with Vizuri, our solution will revitalize the hosting industry."
