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Wotif.com: When big ideas get even bigger

Wotif.com began to tear the Windows envelope to bits shortly into its explosive life; four years later, an alternative 64-bit Linux infrastructure is still keeping up with the fast-growing company. David Braue explains how.

Born in the heady days of the dotcom boom, Wotif.com statistically had little more than a snowball's chance of still being around five years later. After coming onboard to helm the year-old company's IT strategy in 2002, however, CIO Paul Young found that the problem was not its viability -- growing market demand had taken care of that -- but its core Microsoft technology, which was already showing signs of strain from fast-growing visitor numbers.

As was the habit in those days, the Brisbane-based company's original Web site was built around a slew of Microsoft technologies including, most importantly, Windows 2000 and SQL Server. This may have suited its initial design, but Young says from the moment he began with the company it was clear that the environment was struggling to keep up with traffic volumes that were increasing at 100 percent per year.

-I was feeling constrained [by the Microsoft path] and one of the large issues I had at the time was SQL Server being able to keep up with the performance that we required out of it," he explains. -Coping with sustained, ongoing growth of the level that we have is no small issue. It's significant, substantial, ongoing growth, and it hasn't changed for five years."

Turning that innovative culture into real results was the only way for the company to build a scalable infrastructure that would support what is now nearly 370,000 subscribers, 2 million user sessions and 110,000 bookings every month.

Even when these numbers were just projections on a whiteboard, Young believed the flexibility afforded by a more open Linux infrastructure would make it an ideal alternative to the struggling Microsoft servers. -We're a very innovative, quick moving company and some of the reasons behind our decisions were to not be bound into doing things the way proprietary solutions lock you in."

Shortly into his tenure, the development-focused company migrated from its previous architecture to build its core applications around the more open J2EE 1.5 development platform (renamed Java EE 5), supported by Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS servers and Oracle10g Standard Edition database.

Making the switch
Not all Wotif executives shared Young's enthusiasm for the switch.

-There was a lot of doubt about it and we were early adopters of this for a commercial entity," he recalls. -But the CIO's drive is to politically go in and be able to educate, and to get buy-in on these kinds of decisions. We did a very critical pilot for them around a critical piece of functionality for the Web site, and proved that we could get a very highly scalable app out of it." Numbers don't lie, and the pilot test confirmed that a Linux-based infrastructure, running an Oracle database, would increase headroom for the system -by about 1,000 percent", Young says.

Choosing the new operating system and database platform was only part of the change, however: Young's reforms also included the creation of a more framework-driven development methodology, building on agile development techniques to iteratively develop and test the company's core J2EE applications throughout their lifecycle.

Endemic to this approach was the construction of a fully featured test environment where Wotif's 18 developers could automatically simulate the influx of thousands of database requests per second against code in development. With testing a core part of the development approach, the rules are clear: applications must pass all the tests thrown at them, and meet all relevant benchmarks, before they can be released.

True to its performance in initial tests, the Linux and Oracle-based system continued to scale along with Wotif's business for a couple of years. By 2004, however, Young's team was already looking at tapping into new 64-bit processors to open up even more growth possibilities for the company's systems.

Here, again, rigorous testing and benchmarking confirmed the best way forward for the company: recently released 4-way x86-compatible Sun Microsystems Sun Fire V40z servers, based on 64-bit AMD Opteron processors, offered linear scalability that Wotif testing confirmed put them far ahead of the decreasing performance returns seen from Intel's competing Itanium processors.

With performance a key factor in the company's planning, the decision to move to the V40z servers was made quickly; never mind that the CPUs had only been out for a few weeks and weren't yet supported in available operating systems.

In a Microsoft environment, Wotif would have had to wait nearly a year, until Microsoft's release of 64-bit Windows, to build on the new server platform. However, it took the Linux community just a few weeks to offer support for the processor in a subsequent release of the Linux kernel. Wotif installed and tested the new kernel and, finding it performed as promised, went right ahead with what turned out to be a quick and painless migration to the new server platform.

A community for the future
Wotif's strong adherence to plain-vanilla J2EE development was critical in easing the move from Red Hat Linux on 32-bit Intel servers, to the same operating system running on 64-bit AMD-based systems. Having avoided hardware and operating system-specific functionality, the application was easily portable to the new environment.

-Most of our applications run in Java, and I don't like to leverage off sophisticated, hardly used features of Solaris or Linux," Young says. -I think hardware and the operating system are starting to become an abstraction at the enterprise level; as long as I've got an operating system that will support Java, I'm set."

The pilot test confirmed that a Linux-based infrastructure, running an Oracle database, would increase headroom for the system by about 1,000 percent.

Paul Young, Wotif.com CIO

Relying on a community of interested technophiles to produce major code upgrades may not seem like every CIO's idea of a solid risk management strategy, but Young says time has shown that the Linux community's overall reliability, constant self-examination and the broad availability of relevant skills make the strategy viable.

-I'm a results-driven person, and basically we're not waiting a year for a version of software that we can run on bleeding-edge hardware," he explains.

-I've found that most of the really top-notch Java developers have a Linux background, and they're used to things like open source and open standards. It's a culture of bleeding-edge technology: due to the open source community and the amazing amount of contributors out there, [upgrades are] available in short burst increments and it's a very short time to get new enhancements. Bugs and issues tend to get addressed quite quickly; this is one of the defining differences that Linux offers."

Years down the road, Wotif.com has turned Linux into a competitive advantage by clearing a more open, scalable path for itself. The server environment now includes a dozen primary servers and another dozen mirrored servers that are used for development and testing.

Parsons and his team recently completed a scalability plan that will take the architecture forward for the next five to ten years -- and he couldn't be more optimistic about the future.

The future growth -is very exciting and completely supported by the decisions we took to be open standards, Linux, open source and agile development based," he says. -You know you've chosen a good strategy when you look into the future and don't see any significant roadblocks of a technological nature in front of you. The TCO story for Linux is excellent and, for me, the story just keeps on improving."