MSNBC Deploys Datacenter Server as Web Server - Product Information

ENT, Sept 20, 2000 by Scott Bekker

One of the first Windows 2000 Datacenter Server deployments to be publicly discussed puts Microsoft Corp.'s new high-end operating system in a surprising spot in an enterprise infrastructure.

At a Datacenter Server reviewers' workshop last month at Microsoft's (www.microsoft.com) Redmond headquarters, officials described a conservative early deployment at the news site MSNBC (www.msnbc.com) that Microsoft jointly operates with NBC.

Instead of anchoring the news site's three back-end SQL Server databases, though, Microsoft and MSNBC installed Datacenter Server as a front-end Web server.

"When we first started this project, there was some skepticism: Is Datacenter ready for Web servers?" admitted Brett Brewer, program manager at Microsoft who works with dot-com accounts in the Joint Development Program.

The design specifications for Datacenter, which Microsoft plans to officially launch later this month, usually conjures up images of database servers with support for up to 32 processors, 64 GB of RAM, four-node clustering, and the capability to bypass the TCP/IP stack for improved local cluster performance.

Windows 2000 Advanced Server has been positioned as the high-volume Web server of the Windows 2000 family. Still, Microsoft left open the possibility of Datacenter as Web server by including its IP load balancing software, called Network Load Balancing (NLB), in the operating system. NLB is available only in Advanced Server and Datacenter Server.

MSNBC's infrastructure is setup with about 50 Web servers, a mixture of two-processor and four-processor Compaq Computer Corp. (www.compaq.com) servers running Windows 2000 Advanced Server. Those servers are being balanced across eight clusters in groups of about six servers per cluster, Brewer says. The site is different from Microsoft's traditional three-tier Web farm architecture diagram. MSNBC runs its COM application servers on the Web servers, so the site runs on two-tiers: Web servers and database servers.

Having a lot of Web servers does not necessarily constitute a problem. But Brewer says the management of those servers, with the 24-hour news cycle and content-related replication traffic, is challenging.

Some of those headaches seem a natural fit for Microsoft's Application Center 2000 management software slated for release at the same time as Datacenter Server, but MSNBC also wanted to build in the capacity to provide site visitors with more audio/visual streaming.

"MSNBC has so much complexity," says David Mahlum, senior Web architect at MSNBC and MSNBC's manager of the JDP Datacenter project. "We have wire feeds, we have video feeds, TV stuff, integrated programs, online voting. The more complexity you can take out of those things, the better it is."

Mahlum also defined the challenge of a news site. "You never know when a news story breaks," he says. "You have no idea when that load's going to hit your Web farm."

Microsoft's Brewer called the solution worked out between Microsoft and MSNBC, "Scale out with bigger boxes." The short-term project goal is to reduce the number of MSNBC's Web servers by about 66 percent to 16 Web servers running Datacenter Server.

Initially, MSNBC is deploying one clustered pair of Datacenter-based Web servers. They are Compaq ProLiant 8500 servers, each with eight 550-MHz Pentium m Xeon processors, 4 GB of memory, and 18 GB of internal disk.

The clustered pair has been running since early July. "You might have already used Datacenter and not realized it," Brewer says. With some "unique tuning," the Datacenter boxes showed a linear performance increase over MSNBC's Windows 2000 Advanced Server boxes, Brewer says.

Eventually, plans for the site include migrating the three back-end databases to Datacenter Server in a three-node failover cluster configuration and using Datacenter Server's WinSock Direct Path capabilities for bypassing the TCP/IP stack to accelerate communications between the servers. MSNBC is also looking to upgrade its Web servers to 16- and 32-processor machines as they become available.

Windows 2000 Advanced Server can be run on eight-processor machines, although Datacenter Server is designed to be more reliable at this number, plus hardware OEMs such as Compaq must guarantee a minimum uptime package of 99.9 percent with Datacenter Server. Datacenter Server will not be available for sale off the shelf. It must be purchased with a complete system from one of about a dozen OEMs.

"The biggest focus of the JDP this time is validation of the support model," Brewer says. The MSNBC deployment found two bugs prior to last month's Release to Manufacturing of Datacenter Server, he said.