Horizontal expansion saves AutoTrader £1m in capital
investment.
AutoTrader has used 64-bit grid computing to support a rapid
expansion of its online motor exchange operations without the need
for major capital investment in new enterprise servers.
AutoTrader's car search and transaction site receives 200
million hits and 50 million car searches a month, and is
experiencing 40% annual growth in use.
Without investing in grid technologies, AutoTrader would have
been forced into a Unix server upgrade, which would have meant a
capital investment of more than £1m, said Shahid Mohammed, data
operations manager at AutoTrader.
With grid computing, AutoTrader can add new servers to meet
demand incrementally, without having to over-invest in capacity,
Mohammed said.
"For us the only two options were buying bigger and bigger
servers to cope with the extra load, or look at grid computing and
expand horizontally rather than vertically. We have been able to
expand on demand and it also means you spread out the capital
investment over one or two years, plus it costs less," Mohammed
said.
Trader Media, which owns AutoTrader, is using Oracle Database
10g and Real Application Clusters on Sun v40z Opteron servers
running Red Hat 3AS. It aims to generate a return on investment of
approximately 70%, the company said.
Grid computing has also allowed AutoTrader to avoid the
duplicated costs of running failover sites, Mohammed said.
AutoTrader was one of the first large-scale business
implementations of this kind in the UK, according to David
Mitchell, software practice leader at analyst firm Ovum.
However, he said the technology had already been well tried in
scientific computing and the chipsets were not new, so the risks
were reduced. "This is leading edge rather than bleeding edge," he
said
Since AutoTrader also invested in 64-bit Intel Itanium systems,
it has taken on two technologies relatively untried in business.
However, Mohammed said AutoTrader received extensive free
consultancy and support from suppliers including Oracle, Dell, HP,
Intel and Sun Microsystems.
Mohammed said the IT department did need to invest in its skills
in order to support the new technology. "It is more complicated
than standalone technology and you have to take into account the
time it takes to get staff up to speed."
Because grid computing uses a network of servers to support a
variety of applications in a flexible way, AutoTrader is able to
use its system to support its batch processing during the night, as
well as website transactions, which peak during the day.