HealthCentral.com Case Study

By Jennifer Ashton

 

HealthCentral.com provides 24-hour access online to the best health information, search, news, in-depth topic centers, and personalization features on the web. HealthCentral.com offers a unique combination of factual health and medical information combined with entertaining and compelling news around health issues-all strengthened with interactive applications that help users personalize these areas of information and news. On-air, HealthCentral presents in-depth, authoritative, and entertaining coverage of health and medical topics with America's highest-rated physician broadcaster, Dr. Dean Edell. The number three-rated AM talk show host in America, Dr. Dean's on-air presentation of clinically accurate information has been found worthy of the continued attention of millions of fans for the past two decades.
 
The Problem
 
It comes as no surprise to the founders of HealthCentral.com that the web site is continuing to experience exponential growth. In fact, during the initial planning stages of the site, the company's creators modified the question "If we build it, will they come?" to "If we build it, how many will come?"
 
"We knew that many of Dr. Dean Edell's millions of listeners would visit HealthCentral.com when he referred them to it in his radio and television broadcasts," says Deryk Van Brunt, senior vice president of Operations at HealthCentral.com. "However, we had no way of knowing precisely how many would access the site on any given day."
 
As a result, it was difficult to pinpoint how many servers would be needed to accommodate this unknown traffic. After making several projections based on viewership and listenership percentages, however, they came up with approximate numbers. Then they went a step farther. "We also realized that traffic would likely spike dramatically when Dr. Dean's shows air," Van Brunt explains. "Consequently, we knew that we would be dealing with extreme fluctuations-and that such an environment would require a load balancing solution that could intelligently distribute traffic across multiple servers, thereby ensuring high availability as well as high performance."
 
The Solution
 
HealthCentral.com turned to F5 Networks, Inc. and its BIG/ip product. F5 Networks develops turnkey solutions that increase the availability and performance of IP-based servers and network devices such as firewalls, routers, cache servers, proxy servers, and more. F5's BIG/ip high availability, intelligent load balancing solution provides 100 percent reliable, consistent access to mission-critical Internet and intranet applications by enabling the fail-safe use of scalable content servers. For businesses such as HealthCentral.com that want their assets working for them 100 percent of the time, BIG/ip represents a viable solution that guarantees high quality of control (QoC) over their web site.
 
BIG/ip helps ensure that no matter how many consumers access HealthCentral.com at any one time, each individual user has quick access to the company's expansive variety of information, news, columns, and personalized interactive application-based content, even when servers are brought down for regular maintenance and upgrades. BIG/ip first determines availability of servers at the data link, network, transport, and application layers. BIG/ip addresses every possible point of failure. BIG/ip proactively monitors servers and automatically routes traffic around a server that fails or becomes unavailable. If a service stops running on a server, BIG/ip detects it and requests those services from a server that can provide them; then, when the service comes back up, BIG/ip again detects it and allows that service back into the pool. To ensure that users don't receive inappropriate messages, BIG/ip checks the content that each server delivers, routing requests away from malfunctioning applications. BIG/ip also sets thresholds for acceptable performance for a server, service, and application, redirecting requests until performance levels are met; this prevents users from having to endure long waits to their online queries.
 
Once availability has been determined, BIG/ip distributes traffic using both static and dynamic modes, including round robin, ratio, and priority as well as least connections, observed, and predictive modes. Administrators can even fine-tune load balancing by aggregating the metrics gathered by BIG/ip. The result is a stable system that enables consumers to use HealthCentral.com as their preferred source for information that addresses their specific health and medical needs.
 
"For example, an online user might access our Risk Assessment interactive program, answer 75 or so questions about his or her health, and then receive a personalized health report. That report, in turn, might link the user to different content databases-including daily health news, a health library, a database of web sites, and the Dean Edell current and archived content-containing information relevant to that individual. These applications and databases are interlinked to provide an optimal user experience that makes better health as fun, easy, and convenient as possible. BIG/ip is at the foundation of this environment, making sure the appropriate data is always available," says Van Brunt.
 
The effectiveness of BIG/ip also is apparent by what does not happen as interested individuals browse the HealthCentral.com web site. "Our network monitoring tools keep us apprised of how much traffic the site is seeing at any one time. And, as we predicted, traffic increases dramatically during and shortly after the airing of one of Dr. Dean's television or radio broadcasts. BIG/ip handles these traffic spikes beautifully, providing a consistent load across the various servers. Simply put, our site doesn't crash," says Van Brunt.
 
Unlike other corporations for whom the Internet represents only a small portion of their overall business, HealthCentral.com's business is the Internet-which only serves to emphasize the importance of having BIG/ip on site. "We are 100 percent Internet," explains Van Brunt. "As a result, we demand a web site that offers nothing short of 100 percent reliability. That's why we use BIG/ip. It helps hyper-growth companies such as HealthCentral.com scale in ways that other organizations might find impossible. To that end, F5 Networks is a valued partner that helps us realize our mission of personalizing the health care industry."
 
Jennifer Ashton is a writer with Connect Public Relations. She can be reached at 801-373-7888, jennifera@connectpr.com. Deryk Van Brunt can be contacted at 510-848-6911.