Web site hits grand slam: MLB.com delivers play-by-play action to millions of multimedia-hungry baseball fans

Communications News, March, 2004

At MLB.com, live video and audio of postseason games are streamed at virtually broadcast quality. Flash-based "Game Day" scorecards, with pitch-by-pitch action, are delivered in real-time directly from the laptops of "stringers" at the ballparks. "Baseball's Best" classic games, dating to the 1936 World Series, are downloadable to CD from the original radio or television broadcasts. Online ticket sales, up-to-the-minute and historical statistics, off-season news, fantasy leagues, and much more are available.

As one of the Internet's hottest and fastest-growing properties, MLB.com and MLB Advanced Media LP are in the enviable, albeit challenging, position of delivering non-stop baseball action in millions of baseball Fans worldwide. Launched in 2000 and collectively owned by all 30 major league teams, MLB Advanced Media hosts the official league site (MLB.com,) as well as each team's individual site.

In 2003, total annual traffic to the site was expected to top 750 million page views. In 2004, MLB Advanced Media expects to serve one million subscribers. "We've just completed the first season of our subscription services," says Bob Bowman, CEO of MLB Advanced Media. "We attracted more than 300,000 subscribers this year."

MLB.com, however, was not always batting 1.000. A major reason for the site's success lies in its ability to serve up applications and content in rapid-fire fashion, largely made possible by a revamped two-tier architecture and the 100% uptime delivered by MLB.com's new network infrastructure.

In MLB.com's first two seasons of operations, flash crowds and a weak-fielding, three-tier site architecture often combined to bring the site to its knees. For the 2003 season, MLB Advanced Media decided the lineup needed an overhaul and began implementing a series of network enhancements to upgrade in time for opening day, traditionally one of the site's busiest days.

GETTING MORE FROM THE NETWORK

MLB.com's business model is straightforward: pay for the costs of backend infrastructure, while providing free content and streaming of live game-day action--with subscription revenues for advanced services, such as video and audio streaming, sales of classic games downloads and online sales of MLB merchandise. In order to meet MLB Advanced Media's goals and best serve baseball fans worldwide, the MLB.com technology team had a clear-cut mandate: make the site reliable and fast without investing in a series of short-term upgrades. Doing more with the hardware already in place, while improving the quality of experience for one to two million users per day, became a top priority.

During two consecutive seasons with major outages, the site's three-tier architecture had demonstrated an inability to deliver dynamic data, primarily Java server pages. When one Web server or application server crashed, others would follow suit. Throughout the 2001 season, Justin Shaffer, director of operations at MLB Advanced Media, and his team worked double and triple shifts just to keep MLB.com up and running as fans flocked to the site by the hundreds of thousands. Nevertheless, opening day 2001 found the site unavailable for some of the day.

Management knew an immediate fix was needed. So, the MLB.com technology team set out to re-architect and revamp the site from the ground up, consolidating from a three-tier to a two-tier server architecture using Sun servers and a network infrastructure equipped with NetScaler 9000 Series secure-application networking systems.

The team rewrote the applications to run on a single tier of Web servers, added caching and deployed NetScaler 9800HA Secure Application Switches to distribute traffic across its server farm, offload TCP connections from the servers, and compress files for accelerated delivery to users on slower 56k modems. With the site architecture generating content smoothly, the next challenge became delivering that content to millions of users.

MLB.com's credit-card transaction SSL sessions are directed to the NetScaler appliances, which process the keys rather than burdening the Web servers, eliminating the need to have individual SSL accelerator cards in each Web server. Instead of one SSL certificate for each Web server, the new architecture requires just one SSL certificate for the NetScaler system.

"Lots of products do load balancing," says Shaffer. "What makes the solution so valuable is its other functionality. Content switching and offloading SSL have really made a difference in the performance and reliability of our site."

WEB SERVERS FREED UP

The systems handle TCP/IP processing overhead using a request-switching architecture to offload and buffer TCP requests, ensuring that the Web servers can be dedicated to Java and other application-related tasks. "Instead of forcing the Web server to slow down, the system gets content from the server and feeds it out at whatever speed the user's modem can handle, freeing the Web server to move on to another request," Shaffer explains.

The net result: MLB.com runs about 15% faster and uses 30% less bandwidth than previously, all while serving two to three million fans per day. In addition, before the addition of the NetScaler systems and the move to the two-tier architecture, MLB.com required more power to serve less traffic. Now, MLB.com serves higher volumes of traffic with just the Web servers that were already in place. "It has allowed us to scale our traffic exponentially, while improving the experience of the baseball fan on MLB.com considerably," says Shaffer.