The brand SINA needs no introduction in Mainland China and Chinese audiences around the world. A key provider of online media and value-added information services for global Chinese audiences, the company boasts of more than 230 million registered users and more than 60 million users of various paid services worldwide with daily page views topping 450 million.
Sporting events is a key driver of traffic to the SINA site. According to statistics from the company's operational divisions, SINA's page views increase by two to three times over normal volume during such events as the Olympic Games, World Cup and various tournaments.
Traditionally, content providers like SINA have had to add a large quantity of servers and L4 load-balancing equipment to support such traffic spikes, demanding a large capital outlay and operational resource investment. But after the event, Web site traffic returns to normal "” resulting in a huge investment for technology infrastructure that will not be needed most of the time.Thus, supporting dramatic increases in online traffic during major sports events without over-investing was a big challenge for SINA.
The company looked for load balancing solution that could alleviate soaring Web site traffic during major sports events while minimizing costs and decided on Citrix NetScaler, which were deployed on its four data centers in Beijing, Shanghai and Xi'an.
Citrix NetScaler TCP multiplexing technology allowed SINA to consolidate multiple user TCP sessions into fewer sessions on the Web servers, which effectively offloads TCP handling from the Web servers, allowing them to focus on processing user requests. Offloading eliminated application response delays previously experienced by SINA users.
After Citrix NetScaler was deployed, the servers' load dropped dramatically, while throughput experienced a strong increase "” all without the cost of adding more servers.
The company manage to reduce the number of servers required to support the site by 66% and all of the 40 sets of servers that were intended for capacity expansion are now used to support other systems. This does not only help the company minimize expenditure on server purchases, but also lowered spending on racks, power consumption and related facilities costs.
Maintenance costs were also reduced as less manpower was required to manage the site and supporting infrastructure.
Li Songbo, vice president of SINA's Engineering Department said the deployment helped the company improve the performance of SINA's application and content delivery. "Citrix NetScaler also enhanced the security of our applications since Web users only have visibility to the virtual IP instead of the true IP minimizing the chances of attacks by hackers. Since it works well during peak hours, we are able to deliver a seamless user experience to millions of customers."
Songbo and his team has since successively deployed Citrix NetScaler software in its Web email, authentication and SSL VPN systems with plans to deploy NetScaler to SSL acceleration, online compression and content cache functions in the future.