BizRate spent US$20,000 for the two T/X 2400 boxes, and saw a full return on the investment in about six weeks. Mulkey's impetus for making the purchase was simple: "If I can stay under one tier [with the appliances] for two months, I'm done. I've paid back my investment." Even though bandwidth prices dropped substantially, causing the anticipated ROI to take longer to realise, the T/X 2400s also have extended the life of BizRate's server farm. "We've been able to grow the number of pages without growing our server farm as quickly," he says.
Mulkey says he was pleasantly surprised by the results. "Of course, I was sort of a cynic," he admits. "Redline was an unproven company to me at that point." What interested Mulkey in buying the T/X 2400 appliances was that they could plug easily into BizRate's network. "We looked at a couple of different products. One was some company that [had the acceleration function] on a specialised network card." That scenario presented too much risk for the BizRate network. "I don't want to take apart all my servers and install some network card from a company I've never heard of." With the Redline devices, Mulkey says he can turn them off without affecting the rest of the network.
The two T/X 2400 appliances sit between a Cisco LocalDirector and Dell Computer 1650 Linux-based Web servers, each equipped with two 1.4GHz Intel processors and 4GB of memory. BizRate runs between six and 20 Web servers, depending on the amount of traffic Mulkey expects the site to get. The servers run Apache, an open-source Web server software, as well as BizRate's Linux-based application server. Behind that, BizRate has two Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE) 12.1 databases, operating on Sun Microsystems Enterprise 4500 and 3500 servers. One database server holds merchant information, while the other contains consumer data. BizRate keeps all its equipment at a Level 3 Communications collocation facility. All its Internet activity is pushed through Cisco routers and switches.
After almost a year of use, BizRate is happy with the Redline appliances. The company has even enjoyed an unexpected side benefit since they were installed. Throughout the 2001 Christmas season, which kicks off in September for BizRate, staffers found they could focus on other parts of the business, including Web site development and database programming. "My team is not glued to the monitors, which we had to do before," Mulkey says. Then, IT staffers constantly were watching the server activity to make adjustments when the TCP connections got hung up. Today, the staff is just as busy, he says, but it is focusing on pre-empting problems through system maintenance, upgrades, and other value-added projects. The T/X 2400 "adds a little bit of peace of mind," he adds. "That's definitely worth US$20,000."
Kimberly B. Caisse, a technology writer in Westminster, MA, writes regularly about networking issues.
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