One of SA's most recognised Web brands, Ananzi, has enjoyed 99.7% uptime, ie full availability to all Internet users for the last two years.
According to MD Mark Buwalda, this is largely as a result of a strategic decision to invest in Sun Microsystems' technology.
Recognised as SA's leading search portal, Ananzi has maintained a record on the World Wide Web for two years running, with the help of Sun Microsystems and a search system called Spiderman.
"Such a business-critical online environment requires reliable servers and an operating environment that has the ability to handle heavy traffic and huge data sets," says Buwalda. "This is why Ananzi utilises powerful Sun enterprise servers and the Solaris 8 operating environment (OE)."
With more than 544 000 visitors a month (approximately 25 000 visitors every weekday) and over nine million pages viewed per month, it is critical that Ananzi runs round the clock, 24x7, and at optimum performance.
"Due to the large amount of traffic that Ananzi handles, we need servers and an operating environment that are reliable, robust and stable, therefore guaranteeing that much needed continuous uptime," adds Buwalda.
"We cannot afford to go down, not even for a few minutes, as we would lose hundreds of potential users. Fortunately, since we've partnered with Sun, we've achieved 99.7% uptime, which is regarded as a model of reliability in our environment."
Ananzi incorporated the Sun Enterprise 450 Server as part of a powerful integrated search engine, aptly called Spiderman.
Says Buwalda: "Spiderman crawls onto a large number of Web sites and pulls the relevant information from them. This is then indexed, which makes them ready to be easily searched on the Ananzi site." Importantly, Spiderman also checks this regularly to see if they have changed and then updates the information accordingly.
Two Sun Enterprise 250 Servers - which run a Cisco local directory and have mirrored Inktomi search databases, called Search 1 and Search 2 - then receive mirrored information from Spiderman via the Sun 450 server.
User queries are directed to either Search 1 or Search 2, depending on the amount of traffic, after which the directory is accessed for the relevant information.
"Sun's Enterprise 250 servers combine the power, capacity and features needed to run business-critical environments such as Ananzi's," says Daryl Blundell, solution sales manager at Sun Microsystems SA. "When your servers go down, so does productivity and service delivery to your users. The Sun 250 Server enables reliability, availability and serviceability (RAS) traditionally found on high-end systems. However, our mid-tier Sun 250 Servers and 450 Servers now also offer these features at a more affordable price."
Sun's acclaimed Solaris 8 OE runs on all three of the Sun servers. "We chose Solaris for its well-known ability to handle heavy traffic and huge data sets, which is critical in an online environment," says Buwalda.
The Ananzi server architecture
The Ananzi server architecture comprises three Sun servers; Sun Enterprise E450 Server and two Sun Enterprise 220R Servers.
Sun Enterprise E450 Server specs:
* 2 x UltraSPARC-II 400MHz
* Memory Size: 2048MB
* 3 x mirrored disks - 18GB drives
Software
* Operating system: Solaris 8 operating environment
* Software: GCC, Apache HTTP server, Inktomi Enterprise, Perl Scripts, proprietary database
* System + Network Management: Solstice DiskSuite
Functionality
* Provides a development environment for the Ananzi Team
* The server is responsible for the back-end spidering and collection mirroring required by the Inktomi Search Engine. The spider is sent off each night for approximately seven hours.
* There are two Search collections that are used, namely: SA Web (a collection obtained by spidering actual Web sites that are registered with Ananzi); SA Site Collection (a collection obtained by scanning a directory on a local file system representing the Ananzi catalogue structure).
* Daily operational development of HTML Web pages and customised scripts are implemented and tested on this server before going live.
* Web site submissions to the Ananzi catalogue are processed with the use of customised scripts and records inserted into a proprietary database.
* The database of Ananzi catalogue records also forms the starting point for the spider crawling South African Web sites.
* Houses a content delivery tool used by the Sunday Times, which allows the posting of stories on the Ananzi and Sunday Times Web sites.
2x SUN Enterprise 220R Servers specs:
* 2 x UltraSPARC-II 450MHz
* Memory Size: 1024MB
*3 x mirrored disks - 9GB drives
Software
* Operating system: Solaris 8 operating environment
* Languages: GCC, Apache HTTP server, Inktomi Enterprise, Perl Scripts, proprietary database
* System + Network Management: Solstice DiskSuite
Functionality
* The two servers are mirrored and comprise the 'Live' environment of the Ananzi architecture.
* They have mirrored Inktomi Enterprise search engine collections.
* The mirroring is done daily after thorough checks, for consistency, are conducted on the development server.
System redundancy
* The 2X 220R SUN Servers deliver pages to the Web via a cisco Local Director
* This allows for redundancy within the Ananzi architecture, ie the Local Director provides a load balancing capability between the two mirrored servers, thus, allowing for the following scenario: if one of the 'Live' servers were to go down, the Local Director would automatically re-route all Internet traffic to the other 'Live' server, in a completely transparent manner; the Local Director also tracks network sessions and server load conditions in real time, thereby allowing the directing of each session to the most appropriate server.
Security
The three Ananzi servers are located behind a PIX firewall.
Roles
* MTN Network Solutions supplies a comprehensive network solution for the Ananzi servers, supply of local and international bandwidth and access to network traffic graphs.
* Gambit Technologies (PTY) Ltd. This third-party supplies software technical support for the Ananzi servers. It too maintains the Ananzi servers from a hardware point of view and supplies technical support to the Ananzi team.
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Ananzi started life as South Africa's original Internet search engine, and has evolved to become the country's premier search portal, serving up the best of the local Web through its search engine offering and directory service, e-mail, shopping and content services. Recently Brabys, the sub Saharan leader in Business directories and part of the AIGroup, acquired Ananzi from Johnnic e-Ventures. Ananzi is one of the most recognised South African Web brands, with more than nine million pages viewed per month.
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