ESPN.com Takes Application Innovation to the Edge with Elastic Caching

IBM’er Ayalla Goldschmidt discusses ESPN’s presentation on dealing with 15,000 requests a second for personalized information during peak sporting hours.  Enter Ayalla:

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For all you sports fans out there, there’s nothing more exhilarating than watching a game and seeing a new record set live. Well, I think it’s kind of a similar feeling with IT records. ESPN was able to easily handle 15,000 requests per second with only 200 Gigs leaving 40% room for growth. Now that’s impressive! Oh, did I mention the project took less than 3 months?

The other element that makes a game fun is the competition–or in our case Oracle.  We love competing for your business and we always strive to do better than our competitors. Forrester agrees that IBM WebSphere eXtreme Scale is stronger than Oracle Coherence on both strategy and current offering.*

So let’s watch how all of this plays out for our customers.

Manny Pelarinos, Director of Engineering for ESPN Digital Media, gave an amazing talk at IMPACT 2011 about how he and his team redesigned ESPN.com to better serve their sports fans by offering personalized services.

In his presentation, Manny described how ESPN.com built a grid to scale to a number many would consider science fiction. How did they build a solution to deliver personalized content to their millions of sports fans? They designed the GRID made up of many servers and hundreds of Java Virtual Machines. And, they used IBM eXtreme Scale to power the grid.

But don’t take it from me. Check out the video to hear Manny tell ESPN’s story.

And check here more information on IBM WebSphere eXtreme Scale.

* The Forrester Wave™: Elastic Caching Platforms, Q2 2010, by Mike Gualtieri and John R. Rymer for Application Development & Delivery Professionals

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