EURO 2000 soccer tournament caches in

From...

July 25, 2000
Web posted at: 11:06 a.m. EDT (1506 GMT)

by April Jacobs

(IDG) -- The Euro 2000 soccer tournament site recently cached in, setting a new Guinness World Record for most visitors to an event-based Web site.

For diehard soccer fans around the world - and there are many - the fact that the EURO 2000 soccer tournament drew lots of surfers may come as no surprise. Still, the site withstood the rage of more than 1.4 billion hits in a matter of weeks, from June 10 through the July 2, when the final match was captured by France.

Coordinators say the site held up because of advance planning and testing as well as cache devices that doled out content, including real-time video, audio and text stories in five different languages from nine data centers around the world.

MORE COMPUTING INTELLIGENCE

IDG.net home page

Network World Fusion home page

Free Network World Fusion newsletters

IDG.net's technical development page

Sports and entertainment fuse online

Reviews & in-depth info at IDG.net

E-BusinessWorld

TechInformer

Questions about computers? Let IDG.net's editors help you

Subscribe to IDG.net's free daily newsletter for network experts

Search IDG.net in 12 languages

News Radio

Fusion audio primers

Computerworld Minute

Coordinators of the EURO 2000 site included a team of about 60 people from Sportal.com, a global online sports site, which created all the content for the site as well as PSINet, which hosted the content on its delivery network around the world. The infrastructure included Web switches from Arrowpoint, recently purchased by Cisco, and caching devices from CacheFlow. The 28 CacheFlow cache devices served all content, which freed up the Web servers to handle any transaction-type requests and content origination tasks.

And while most enterprise users aren't in the market to set a world record, they share some common goals with those who have, and can take some lessons from them, say observers. Like most e-commerce, or event-based Web sites, the EURO 2000 site was built with an eye toward meeting peak demand - not just being able to serve average loads. Being able to meet peak demand is critical to keeping users coming back for more. The curious as to why need to look no further than what happened to sales when some retail sites folded under holiday demand and shoppers couldn't make purchases.

For the EURO 2000 site, a key challenge, says Sportal.com's Stephen Nuttall, was making sure surfers could get news and real-time video delivered quickly and reliably in five different languages. The editorial staff was multi-national and conducted coverage and interviews in the language appropriate to who they were speaking with, or talking about. Those interviews and other events coverage were then translated and put into distribution format in Rotterdam and sent to the site's main data center in Los Angeles. The Los Angeles data center distributed the content in multiple languages to cache farms around the world.

The cache farms also served more than the single, but critical purpose of doling content out to soccer fans - they also served as a measure of security against would be hackers. The issue of hacking always looms large in the minds of event coordinators, because they are typically a favorite target for publicity seeking net attackers.

"All the users of the site accessed the various cache farms, so no one actually touched the master data center," says Nuttall. "Had there been an attack, we could have shut down a cache farm only, and users would still have been able to get content from caches in other locations."

For those hungry for world record status, planning and plenty of cache are key. Coordinating the technical teams and putting the infrastructure together took about six months. Internet time.

Dutch-free soccer Web site draws fire
(The Industry Standard)
Soccer battle for Net turf
(The Industry Standard)
Sports and entertainment fuse in new ways online
(The Industry Standard)
Wimbledon net hit 2.3 billion times
(Computerworld)
Score check
(The Industry Standard)
LatAm sports site secures $11M from investors
(IDG.net)
Fulfill your sports fantasies online
(The Industry Standard)
Huddling on Net sports
(The Industry Standard)

EURO 2000
CacheFlow
Cisco

Note: Pages will open in a new browser window

External sites are not endorsed by CNN Interactive.