Network Performance
Appliance boosts performance
Acceleration solution assists ASP.NET applications without requiring manual code tuning.
In spring of 2007, Marqui,
a Vancouver-based provider of on-demand
marketing automation software, was becoming
a victim of its own success. The company's
Web application-a suite of marketing
campaign management and Web content
management services-was gaining significant
traffic. In just six months, the company's
customer base-ranging from small nonprofits
to major multinational corporations-had
doubled. Even more challenging, the types of
customers Marqui served was changing, as
well.
"The appliance is easy to configure, and it's simple to turn the application acceleration treatments on and off."
-Jackie Reid
"Our market was evolving
from simple Web sites to complex,
media-intensive business-to-business sites
with a lot of interaction and workflow,"
says Jackie Reid, vice president of client
services for Marqui. "As that shift became
clear, we had to ask ourselves, 'What does
this mean for our application?' If this is
the type of customer we're going to be
serving and these are the types of Web sites
we'll be deploying, we're going to see a lot
more strain on our infrastructure."
Marqui's Web servers were
rapidly approaching their limits, and
performance of both the Web application and
the customer sites was beginning to suffer.
The typical response would be to deploy more
servers, but Reid and other Marqui leaders
recognized that the infrastructure was not
really the problem. It was the extremely
resource-intensive nature of the Web-based
marketing services they were providing.
"Our application is built
with the Microsoft ASP.NET framework, and we
employ a lot of standard ASP.NET controls,
like interactive text editors and Web design
tools, that developers throughout the
industry use," explains Reid. "As soon as
that kind of control is in your application,
it sucks out a lot of performance. But in
our business, we target marketers who expect
an intuitive user interface. And the more
feature-rich the control, the heavier the
take on performance."
Marqui leaders quickly
realized they were looking at a complex
problem. Beefing up the infrastructure might
provide some short-term relief, but scaling
with long-term growth would require changing
the behavior of their application.
"That raised a lot of
questions," Reid recalls. "How much of our
code do we want to re-engineer? Do we rip
out our entire control set, which is working
well for us but we know is a resource hog?
What would that mean for our customers? And
how much of our development resources should
we devote to performance?"
Marqui's development team
calculated that the 12-person staff could
optimize the application code in about three
months-assuming they focused exclusively on
performance tuning and ignored all other
development.
Delay not an option
"It was going to
significantly impact delivery of our product
roadmap," says Reid. "We would have had to
delay the entire feature set we had
planned-all of which was necessary to keep
up with some of the new competitors in this
space-just to gain some performance."
Marqui needed to take
action quickly, but every option had
trade-offs, none of which looked
particularly attractive. Fortunately, some
of Marqui's leaders had been speaking with
colleagues from Strangeloop Networks, a
Vancouver-based startup located a few blocks
from Marqui's offices. After hearing about
Marqui's issues, Strangeloop engineers
suggested they might have an answer: the
Strangeloop AS1000 application-scaling
appliance. The appliance boosts the
performance of ASP.NET applications without
requiring manual code tuning or
infrastructure overhauls.
"We immediately saw the
potential of Strangeloop's AS1000," recalls
Reid. "Here was a network device that would
allow us to deliver the performance our
customers demanded with the feature set we
needed to be competitive. And we could do it
without re-engineering our application."
Marqui initially deployed
the AS1000 between the network load balancer
and the server farms in its testing
environment. A gamut of tests was conducted
to verify that the AS1000 was improving
performance, and to make sure it did not
negatively affect the Marqui marketing
automation suite or clients' Web sites.
"From a deployment
perspective, it's a very simple appliance,"
says Reid. "You basically plug it in, point
your servers to it and go. The appliance is
easy to configure, and it's simple to turn
the application acceleration treatments on
and off, so we were able to run lots of
tests. We immediately saw page-load
performance anywhere from 10 to 100 times
faster."
After the tests, Marqui
set all of its Web-hosting servers to filter
through the Strangeloop AS1000 and took the
solution live. "We made the decision to flip
the switch, and the next day, we probably
got 15 calls from customers asking, 'Hey,
did you put us on a new server? Our site is
way faster!'"
When Marqui released a
new version of its marketing automation
suite, the company configured its
application servers to run through the
Strangeloop AS1000, as well. As a result,
servers that previously supported 100
customers could handle 300. In addition,
customers logging onto the application to
access online marketing tools or make
changes to their Web sites found that pages
that used to take a few seconds to load were
now served up in one second or less.
Bumps in the road
While the improvements
were dramatic, the implementation was a beta
test, and there were a few bumps along the
way. Marqui's application server supports a
variety of secondary applications, such as
polling and survey software, and the
company's engineers were not sure if the
AS1000 was handling them correctly.
Marqui was also running
its secure sockets layer (SSL) encryption on
the Web servers themselves and had to move
that function to the network load balancer
to work with the beta version of the AS1000.
(Today, the solution supports either
configuration.)
"I didn't think the
implementation was going to be perfect, and
if you ever find someone describing a
software or hardware implementation that
was, that person is lying," says Reid. "But
it really was quite simple, and they've been
fabulous working with us through whatever
items come up."
Today, Marqui has three
AS1000 appliances-one for internal testing
and two redundant units in production. The
Marqui application suite and all customer
Web sites now filter through the appliance,
and all users are realizing the performance
benefits.
"Our customers are
delighted with the improved performance
they're seeing, and we're thrilled we've
been able to achieve that without having to
modify our application," says Reid. "We're
also making much better use of our
infrastructure, and we're confident now that
it will continue to meet our needs as we
grow."
Reid also contends the
solution has enhanced Marqui's strategic
edge. "We're quite competitive now, but if
we had paused for the last year to do a
bunch of performance work, we'd be a step
behind our competitors," she says. "We were
basically able to rip all of that work out
of our project plan. Now, we can focus our
development resources on our feature set,
rather than worrying about performance."
The savings Marqui
realized by avoiding that ongoing
development effort paid for the first AS1000
in less than two months, and for the two
additional appliances in just over seven
months. The return on investment is even
greater when considering the additional
business Marqui wins by being able to offer
better Web performance than competitors.
"We'll have potential
customers who are unsure whether they want
to switch their hosting environment, and
we'll put their site on our server and let
them compare the performance with their
current host," says Reid. "They can see for
themselves the difference in how fast the
pages load. We've found this convinces them
to not only subscribe to the marketing
service, but also have us host their site."
The most important
benefit of Marqui's performance optimization
solution, however, will be realized over
time, as the company continues to provide
the best possible Web features to its users,
without worrying about how they might affect
performance.
"Since end-user
experience is so important to us, we will
continue to use a lot of heavy ASP.NET
controls," says Reid. "That's where the
AS1000 provides the most immediate benefits
for us, and the biggest bang for our buck."
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