Domino's Pizza has introduced load-balancing technology
to beat the weekendrush for online pizza
orders.
The firm, which sells over 20% of its pizzas online, claims that
the technology paid for itself by ensuring the availability of
late-night pizzas for just one weekend.
"At peak times on Friday and Saturday nights, even just 10
minutes slowdown on a server can be a real problem for us," said
Phil Thompson, IT infrastructure manager.
The retailer, which has seen online sales grow rapidly over the
past 12 months, introduced the load-balancing technology from Zeus
Technology in 2007 following a
surge in demand for online orders following a marketing
campaign.
It is now extending its use of the Zeus appliances to provide
greater resilience to its website.
"Previously, if a server failed an engineer had to manually dial
in and switch the load to another server. But Zeus automatically
polls each server and redirects the traffic," said Thompson.
The Zeus equipment allows Domino's to create new versions of its
website on a test server, and to switch rapidly back to an older
version of the site if customers have problems ordering.
Thompson also plans to use the Zeus appliances to cache web
content frequently requested by online customers, reducing the load
on the web servers.
The company has two appliances for load balancing at its Milton
Keynes head office, and two for redirecting traffic between Milton
Keynes and London.
Thompson said the appliances were simple to install, but
required the company to rethink how it managed its domain
names.