Msnbc.com Aces Election Coverage, Supports Unprecedented Site Traffic with Ease

As the online destination for the NBC News family, msnbc.com features content from "Today," "NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams," "Dateline NBC," "Meet the Press," NBC Sports, and MSNBC TV. On an average day, our data centers handle up to 1.2 gigabits (Gbps) of website traffic. But breaking news can happen at any moment, and it often results in very high traffic volumes.

To meet viewers' expectations, we've architected our network to handle the unexpected. This means building in redundancy, engaging a content delivery network (CDN) for overflow traffic, and also providing intelligent load balancing so that traffic is always routed to the most available, highest-performing servers.

Vying for Viewers

Msnbc.com relies on products from F5 to ensure that we remain at the top of the online news world. The competition is stiff, and includes Yahoo! News, CNN Digital Network, and Fox News Digital Network. No matter how compelling our content is, it won't help us win and retain viewers unless our site is highly available. People don't have time for poor site performance. There are many other online news sites they can turn to, which means we can easily lose viewers through poor performance.

Making History

The most recent test of the strength of our network infrastructure came on election night 2008, when our site experienced unprecedented traffic volumes. In fact, it was by far our highest traffic day ever-nearly 250 million page views and more than 20 million unique viewers*.

Of course, we knew in advance that this was going to be a remarkable day, with remarkable site traffic. First, we were covering an historical presidential election and second, over the past decade, more viewers have turned to the web as their primary news outlet than ever before.

In preparation for the event, we made sure our failover measures, such as the CDN, were in place, and we requested 24/7 help desk hotlines with our network infrastructure partners in the event of any emergencies. And we took comfort in the capabilities of our existing infrastructure.

Maintaining an Agile Infrastructure

Our data centers are fronted by F5^® BIG-IP^® Global Traffic Manager ^® (GTM) [1500] devices, to load balance traffic among locations. Also, at each data center, two F5 BIG-IP^® Local Traffic Manager ^® (LTM) 6800 devices sit in front of our web servers, load balancing traffic among individual servers.

On November 4, 2008, we experienced a combined 2 Gb of traffic per second to our data centers. Maximum capacity for both data centers is 4 Gb per second. Because the CDN was active, traffic was lighter than it could have been. But in previous breaking news situations, we've pushed the F5 devices to near-maximum capacity-as high as 3.8 Gb without the CDN-and they've been extremely steady for us in every situation.

The BIG-IP devices help us maintain an agile network because they automatically route traffic to the best resources. And in the event that a user encounters an issue on the network, they help us seamlessly reroute that traffic to the highest-performing server. This agility helps us attract-and retain-viewers. This was proven on election day when our viewers spent nearly 13.5 minutes on our site, compared to 10.5 minutes for CNN.com.**

There were 20 million viewers watching the NBC television network on election night, and there were 20 million viewers accessing msnbc.com. This speaks volumes about where people are going for news today. Our highly experienced engineers have constructed a failsafe network to support the trend towards online news. The F5 devices are a critical component of this network, enabling us to provide 100 percent site availability on election night, and superior performance every day of the year.