With traffic steadily increasing at its popular ValuPage.com Web site—which receives about 2 million hits per day and serves about 120,000 dynamic page views—Supermarkets Online needed to get more performance from its servers. After upgrading a few of its database servers to a pre-release version of Microsoft® Windows® 2000 Server, Supermarkets Online saw such large performance gains that it decided to deploy Windows 2000 across the board. The result has been a 50 percent increase in throughput, as well as 99.5 percent availability. Improved server performance and increased manageability have lowered the total cost of ownership (TCO), adding dollars to the Supermarkets Online bottom line.
Customer Profile
Supermarkets Online is a marketing company that distributes manufacturers’ incentives to online users through its ValuPage Web site and ValuPageE-mail program. Supermarkets Online is majority owned by Catalina Marketing Corporation with a minority investment from The Tribune Company.
In July 1996, Catalina Marketing founded Supermarkets Online, Inc. as a subsidiary that would expand its marketing business to the Internet. Today, with 40 employees, Supermarkets Online’s success is built upon providing reliable online services while keeping an eye on the bottom line.
Supermarkets Online has found that running the Microsoft Windows 2000 operating system on its Web site contributes to the bottom line in two important ways. First, the operating system’s substantially improved performance reduces the need to purchase new equipment to handle growing demand. Second, new manageability features in Windows 2000, such as remote administration and the Microsoft Management Console (MMC) tools built into Windows 2000, make administration easier and less time-consuming. This reduces the number of administrators required to manage servers, again reducing expenses.
Increasing Traffic Requires Better Server Performance
Through its ValuPage Web site and ValuPageE-mail program, Supermarkets Online distributes manufacturers’ incentives—including coupons, recipes, and rebates—to online users. Consumers use ValuPage discount offers to save money on their purchases at more than 11,500 supermarkets nationwide. The ValuPage Web application generates a list of offers that a site visitor can take to a participating grocer and redeem for Web Bucks. Web Bucks can be used on the next visit to obtain a discount on any item in the store.
All of the Web pages at ValuPage.com are created dynamically from a database running SQL Server 7.0. To see the specials in their area, consumers enter their ZIP code. The Web application then sends a query to the database and displays a list of local participating retailers. When consumers pick their preferred grocer, another query is processed to show the offers for that particular grocer. Users are then given the option to customize the offers displayed on their ValuPage, as shown in the following screen shot, requiring another roundtrip to the database before the final ValuPage is displayed for printing.
Users can customize and edit offers displayed on their ValuPage
Because ValuPage.com is such a dynamic, high-traffic Web site, it requires top-notch technology to run. Supermarkets Online originally built ValuPage.com on the Microsoft Windows NT® 4.0 operating system because of its reliability and scalability, using Microsoft SQL ServerTM 7.0 for the database and the Netscape FasTrak Web server. While the company was happy with the solution, steadily increasing site traffic meant that Supermarkets Online needed better server performance. In addition, demand was quickly outstripping the capabilities of FasTrak. The site clearly needed a high-performance Web server.
Easy Deployment
When Microsoft Windows 2000 Server became available through the Microsoft Beta program, Supermarkets Online technical staff was eager to evaluate it, along with Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) 5.0, the Web server built into Windows 2000 Server. After upgrading a few of the database servers to a beta version of Windows 2000, Supermarkets Online saw such large performance gains that it decided to deploy Windows 2000 across the board, on all 22 Web servers and 11 database servers.
David Banker, Executive Director of IT at Supermarkets Online, tells the story, "We received a copy of the Windows 2000 beta and put it on some of the database servers. We had virtually no problems for three weeks straight. Even better, performance was up. We just started running SQL Server 7.0 on the upgraded server, and that was that. After that experience, we felt very comfortable putting Windows 2000 into production on our remote databases."
In order for the ValuPage applications to run on IIS 5.0, some code changes were required. Once testing and bug fixing were complete, the deployment went smoothly, and IIS 5.0 was quickly rolled out across the site.
Faster Performance
With a site as busy as ValuPage.com—where servers may handle more than 30,000 sessions per hour and create dynamic pages for each request—performance is crucial. As Banker explains, "There are many people hitting the site at once, and if the servers are slow to process their page requests, it creates a bottleneck. Some people end up waiting, the queue becomes larger over time, and then site performance begins to degrade. To maintain good performance, we need rapid response time from the servers: The faster the server is able to dispatch one task, the faster it can start up the next one."
The improved performance made possible by Windows 2000 and IIS 5.0 not only keeps ValuPage.com visitors from having to wait, but also translates into cost savings for Supermarkets Online. "Windows 2000 allows us to handle more business with the same amount of equipment. This reduces our equipment cost, which is based on traffic," says Banker.
Upon deploying Windows 2000 and IIS 5.0, Supermarkets Online noticed performance improvements immediately—on both the Web and the database servers. "When we migrated to Windows 2000, we saw a noticeable performance increase in the databases. We saw more speed—an increase in response time to queries from the Web servers. The response was perceptibly faster," recounts Banker.
Supermarkets Online observed similar improvements in the Web services. The company originally decided to migrate to IIS 5.0 because of its tight integration with Windows 2000. It was delighted with the enhanced throughput and increased performance of the server in terms of the number of concurrent sessions it could handle as well as its speed in serving pages. Supermarkets Online was able to further enhance performance by adding memory, because the disk-caching features of IIS 5.0 allow it to make use of additional memory.
Remote Management
Windows 2000 manageability enhancements are also serving the Supermarkets Online bottom line. By using the remote management features that are built into Windows 2000, technical staff can view information about servers—for example, physical configuration, installed memory, and disk configuration—from a remote location on the network, and they can use MMC to make configuration changes.
"With Windows 2000 remote management capabilities, we save time by not having to physically go to the equipment," says Banker. "Our computers are in a different building from our offices, and we used to have to walk over there frequently in order to manage the servers. Now it is possible for us to consider locating some equipment at our home office on the East Coast, because we wouldn’t have the expense of either traveling there to manage the servers or paying somebody else to do it."
More Money to Spend on Building Revenue
With success, Supermarkets Online has continued to be budget-conscious while it builds revenue. "When you are a startup, you have a small budget. Even though we have been very successful, we continue to be careful, because we want to continue building our revenue. Keeping costs down helps us focus our resources where they will help us the most."
Windows 2000 is important in containing costs. Banker explains, "There are many pieces to it, but Windows 2000 is certainly going to help us by reducing our capital expenditures and keeping staff costs down. The upgrade expense was minimal, and the amount of time we spent for deployment was small. In comparison, the payoff has been large. I’d call that a good investment."
Software and Services
SQL ServerTM 7.0 Visual C++®
Visual Studio® 6.0
Windows 2000 Server and
Windows 2000 Advanced Server with Internet Information Services (IIS) 5.0
