Boston Marathon Web site to run with load-balancing software

Computerworld - For fans following the 111th running of the Boston Marathon next Monday, near-real-time data on the pace of the 23,800 participants will be available online as in previous years. But for the first time, the Boston Athletic Association's race Web site will incorporate load balancing and remote network management capabilities from F5 Networks Inc. that will add more capacity without more servers.

An estimated 950,000 visitors, including the news media, will generate an estimated 10 million page views during six hours of the marathon from Hopkinton, Mass., to downtown Boston, F5 officials said. The Boston event is the world's oldest annual marathon and is one of the races in the elite World Marathon Majors series.

John Burgholzer, technology coordinator for the BAA, said the site handled about 750,000 visitors and more than 6 million page views in the "relatively small window of six hours" on race day last year. That system held up successfully, but the BAA wanted the ability to scale the site this year and in coming years without adding many more servers or additional bandwidth.

So the BAA moved from Microsoft Corp.'s network load-balancing software to F5's Big IP Local Traffic Manager on the advice of the BAA's server provider, Hewlett-Packard Co., Burgholzer said. F5 software supports nine HP blade servers in a data center in Marlboro, Mass., for the month before and after the race, up from the normal two blade servers used for race registration and other information the rest of the year, he said.

Burgholzer said performance on the public Web sites "was a little bit faster" with Big IP during a stress test done a month ago in HP labs in Houston. But Big IP also offers "twice the scalability" of previous products, he added, meaning the BAA might need only half as many servers as the site grows.

"That means savings on space and bandwidth," Burgholzer said. Seattle-based F5 is donating the technology, valued at about $120,000, he noted. HP is donating the servers, valued at $220,000.

Burgholzer, head of consultancy Information Overload in North Reading, Mass., said the BAA's Web traffic has doubled or tripled on race day since he started working for the BAA eight years ago.

The Web site offers data to the public and the news media that rivals that of any of the top races in the world, he said. About 1,000 members of the media seated in a separate room near the finish line can get near-real-time data on the runners, including information on the lead runner and the runner's projected finish time. Much of the same data is available to the public, but about five minutes later. Public access is managed on seven servers on race day, with two dedicated to the media.