from Jan Griesel
During the last two weeks, we made further improvements to the plentymarkets cloud. The new technology that we are using has a very positive effect on the loading times of the webshops that we host.
In 2011, we intensively analyzed the way that our all-in-one E-commerce solution is used and we tested different types of technology in a testing environment. Since November 2011, we have been in the process of introducing new technologies and intensively expanding our hosting concept.
When selecting the new technology, we were primarily interested in our cloud having a high level of data security and availability. Our goal is to have enterprise hosting solutions be applied to even our standard leased edition, plentymarkets Professional. This challenge is especially great since our data flow is in the gigabyte range, yet we want to offer a business solution without having to increase our low product costs.
We've decided to accept this challenge and have already made several improvements:
Application servers
The application servers process incoming queries and transmit them to the webshops. Before this takes place, load balancers are used to distribute the load of incoming queries among the wide range of application servers that are available. We came to realize, however, that we have simply become too large for standard solutions. Therefore, we developed our own software solution to control the load balancing.
Database servers
With the plentymarkets professional 1000 rate and higher, the changes that you make to data will not only be saved on our database server but also on another physically separate server. These failover servers will take over the tasks of the master database servers in case they should crash.
Storage
We had to overcome a few technical obstacles in order to make changes to storage (webspace). In the end, we decided to change the storage solution that was introduced in November and December, 2011 because the original solution did not meet our key performance indicators. We implemented the new storage solution during the last two weeks and have been using it for approximately 30% of the systems that we host. Currently, we have been meeting our key performance indicators. However, we will continue observe the situation for a few more weeks before switching the rest of the systems over to the new storage solution.
Caching
A new caching technology went online this past week, which was set up on servers that are used especially for this purpose. The data that is saved on these servers is only needed for a very short time and then has to be renewed. The new caching technology makes all of the data available in RAM and therefore achieves unsurpassable reading and writing rates. The currently installed server has several hundred gigabytes of RAM and is used for all plentymarkets Professional systems starting with version 4.306 and higher. This innovation is especially noteworthy, since we not only host large webshops but also extremely small webshops that only generate 500 orders or less per month. Purchasers visit these small webshops so infrequently during the day that the cache is old and has to be newly created every time there is a visitor. The extremely fast caching technology also improves the loading time in such situations. Large webshops profit from this even more because the available content is generally up-to-date and only needs to be read from the cache.
Network
The extensive development of our technological infrastructure led to a sharp increase in the number of server racks that are needed. At the same time, the internal data flow increased as well. Therefore, we greatly expanded the internal network in order to achieve a data flow of up to 10 gigabytes between the racks.
These new measures greatly increased the speed of the webshops that are using the new hosting technology. As long as the webshops were not overloaded with items and images, the pages were able to load in less than one or two seconds. Despite these new technological improvements, the webshop owner and webdesigner can still do their part to keep page loading times to a minimum.
The next few weeks are sure to be very exciting for us. If the new storage technology continues to be successful, then we will switch all of the remaining systems. Once again, we are faced with solving a task of Herculean proportions.
I would like to take this chance to thank the system administrators for all of their hard work and dedication. They worked a lot of night shifts in the past few weeks.