Digital River installs 15 Terabytes of Sun storage

Digital River must not only customize the look and feel of both business-to-business and business-to-consumer e-commerce front-ends, but also must store and retrieve the content for each of its clients by hosting and managing their complete e-commerce operations. By basing their infrastructure on 15 terabytes of Sun storage, which includes the Sun StorEdge A1000 and the Sun StorEdge D1000 disk arrays, Digital River is able to build, host and manage e-commerce systems for its clients with data-rich services and a complex business-to-business product catalogue. These value-add services include e-marketing, fraud protection, customer service, physical and digital product fulfillment, integration with their backend systems and reverse logistics services.

Sun targets Digital River's unique e-commerce marketplace with high-performance solutions.

Digital River builds its systems with an overhead factor to handle huge spikes in traffic at a short notice and purchases more servers when they get close to 50% of their capacity. Most companies build systems with the expectation of growing to 80 or 90% of capacity before purchasing new servers, overlooking the requirement for high availability during peak loads. For high performance, storage needs to be not only scalable, but also highly available.

Typically, a company builds a Web site by constructing several static HTML pages and when a change is required, modifies each necessary page. Digital River, however, has many clients, and the descriptions of the customers' products change continuously. Using separate static pages would be extremely unmanageable; therefore, Digital River has instead taken a data-driven approach by storing all of the content in its databases. The content is stored once and is thereby accessible to every client that sells a particular product.

One potential downfall to this approach is the slow page-generation time. Digital River solved this by applying multi-level caching internal to the Sun servers. When a page is requested, the page is cached locally. If an update has occurred, Digital River's system detects the update and flushes the cache so that a new, updated page is generated from scratch. Every subsequent request for this page is then very fast, because the page is already sitting in the cache. Evidence of this can be seen in average page latencies of less than one to two seconds across all clients.

The entire Sun infrastructure is configured for high availability using clustering technology and load-balancing devices.