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WARP 2063E Application Pre-Processor Case Study
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| Lastminute.com (Nasdaq: LMIN) is Europe's number 1 on-line travel site and the second largest e-tailer in Europe (Amazon.com is #1). The company is based in the U.K. The Web site is also available locally in several other large countries like Sweden, Italy, Germany, Australia, France, Spain, Holland, South Africa, and Japan. Lastminute.com provides easy-to-navigate pages with a wide and discounted selection of holidays, hotels, flights, luxury travel, train tickets, car hire, and travel insurance. When searching for a particular airline ticket you simply enter the starting point, destination, and dates and you will be provided with a list of available routes, airlines and of course the corresponding prices. Lastminute.com also provides a wide selection of hotels at competitive prices. All transactions including ticket purchases and hotel bookings can be completed on-line. In addition to the standard products that are usually offered by major on-line travel sites, Lastminute.com also provides restaurant reservations, tickets to the theatre and to sports events, DVD rentals and even takeaway. |  |
| The Internet has become a major source for travel related e-commerce. Thru innovative marketing and good commerce practices, Lastminute.com witnessed a surge in new on-line business. LastMinute's web business activity grew to over 1 million page views per day, with over 250,000 unique sessions. It is expected that these numbers will double by September, 2003 - the beginning of a peak travel season. To meet these new demands initially, the company added more application servers, more database servers and finally a second redundant data center. The challenge was to continue delivering high quality of service, which for an e-tail web site means fast response time and the ability to sustain web traffic peaks. At the same time, it was important to continue growing the number of site visitors to bring in more revenue and make the sites attractive to advertisers. |  |
Lastminute.com evaluated a number of options to address the challenge. One option was to continue growing its application server and database infrastructure. This was a costly proposition to implement, and it did not address the performance metrics to an acceptable degree. A better alternative was to optimize the web application by utilizing application acceleration technology. Before trying WARP, Lastminute.com considered several application acceleration technologies and products. However, each provided only small incremental improvements.
WARP Solutions presented a unique solution that combined a broad collection of application acceleration technologies in one appliance - the WARP 2063e Application Pre-Processor.
In one network appliance, WARP 2063e combines the following Application Acceleration components:
Two units were installed in a reverse proxy configuration, in each datacenter. A global load balancer was configured to "prefer" the 2063e over existing web servers, therefore, achieving high performance and avoiding network failure points. Complete production rollout, from initial tests to implementation lasted three weeks, and encompassed 40 websites.
| Today, 100% of the traffic for all 40 Lastminute.com sites is served by the 4 WARP 2063e appliances. The appliances support an average of 50 requests per second, across all 4 appliances and maintain an average CPU utilization between 20% and 30%.Prior to WARP 2063e, the average response time could reach as high as 28 seconds. After WARP 2063e appliances were deployed, the average response time has been reduced to 3 to 4 seconds - representing a 400% improvement in average performance.
The following graph represents the performance statistics for lastminute.com following the installation of 2063e. Test Performance Summary – LastMinute.com: Average Response Time: 2.790 seconds Average for the Last 30 days: 4.329 seconds |  |
| The following graph represents the performance statistics for a major competitor of LastMinute.com during the same measurement period.
Average Response Time: 10.113 seconds Average for the Last 30 days: 9.754 seconds |  |
This document is for informational purposes only. WARP Solutions makes no warranty, expressed or otherwise implied in this summary. The information contained in this document represents the current view of WARP Solutions on the issues discussed as of the data of publication.
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