Assignment n°3: ESPN Video case

 

During the month of october an assignment concerning a ESPN video was given to us where we had to answer to a few questions.

The video was totally instructive, albeit the presentator in the video was speaking to a quite quick level.

Nevertheless it was the occasion to learn more about the way an app and a e-business system, such as ESPN which is a huge firm, works.

 

Here is a link (.docx) to the assignment.

 

Sources used: ESPN video on youtube. Wikipedia.org (search ESPN)

 

FYI: here is the document in case the link wouldn't work

 

E-Business

 

Assignment

 

Chapter 4 Case 1 ESPN

 

• How many request from users does ESPN receive each second? Do you think this is a consistent pattern or does it have peaks and valleys? When does it peak?
   

ESPN receives more than 10.000 requests from customer every second. It’s relentless, i.e. every second of an event ESPN gets more than 10.000 requests. It thus peaks during an event.

 

• Why does ESPN store personal information and preferences on its databases and how does this personal information complicate the ability of ESPN to respond to requests from users? Why can’t ESPN just use Web page to caching to handle the loads?

 

ESPN stores these information on databases (on average 5 kb per user, in total over 200 Gigs, with heavy redundancy) so that users can access to their personal information that are carried forward on every ESPN platforms or Apps they would use or on other Web sites from ESPN. Thanks to this feature users can access to their personal information on their iPhone, BlackBerry device, on every web site ESPN owns.

 

• How much information on users does ESPN store? Why does this pose a challenge for ESPN? Can’t they just use a standard 1 Terabyte hard drive from a PC? Why can’t they just use a single PC?
   

ESPN stores over 200 Gigs of users’ information that need to be stocked. The user’s info has to interact with the system, to avoid too much redundancy ESPN uses a large data base.

 

• What platforms do ESPN customers use when access their Web sites, and how does this further complicate ESPN’s processing picture?

 

There is the regular Web site, the Mobile Web site, the Soccernet and Deportes. As they are all different and ESPN wants them to interact and that the users information to be carried on forward, it complicated ESPN’s processing picture. But thanks to that it allows users to have access to their same personal information on every device, on every Web site ESPN owns.

 

• What are the key components in ESPN’s solution? Describe the function of each.
   

First there is the Personalisation DB, then the GRID, then the Composer, then the Existing Service Tier.

To summarise the regular process it would be: a user comes in, uses ESPN.com and wants to get its favourites. The request is send to the Composer which will almost immediately (in sub seconds) communicate to the Grid, which knows thanks to the preloaded information from the personalisation DB what your preferences are. These ones are communicated to the Composer and forwarded to the Existing Service Tier. The composer will ask for the news, scores, etc. and the Existing Service Tier will communicate to it in XML the requested information based on the users’ preferences. The composer will then communicate and show to the users its favourites. All this is done and executed in a very short time. No more than a second is needed.

 

• Why is scalability so important to ESPN?
   

Cause thanks to that very important Grid’s feature, it allows ESPN to switch on and or off servers very quickly and automatically depending on where and what services are needed to procure the best experience. Actually the Grid is able to handle a growing or decreasing amount of work in a capable manner. There is then a better use of energy. It’s an optimisation of the power use by ESPN.