Clicking the mouse
Walt Disney Internet Group’s CTO serves up growth and looks to a content-rich, bright future
“IT WAS ALL STARTED by a mouse,” said Walt Disney. Today the mouse fronts the Walt Disney theme parks and corporation and is an icon that represents the Disney Corporation’s goal of providing the ultimate “guest experience.” The mission doesn’t stop with managing the crowds at Cinderella’s castle.
The tenet has a digital side, executed by the North Hollywood, Calif.-based Walt Disney Internet Group (DIG as Disney insiders call it). And it’s up to CTO Doug Parrish to provide the “guest experience” at Disney.com. DIG also hosts several other household-name sites, including ESPN.com, ABCNews.com, Movies.com, Oscar.com, SuperBowl.com (2000), and NCAA.com.
As CTO, Parrish takes the Disney corporate mission to heart, but with a technical angle. “We’re serving upwards of 4 billion hits a month across all properties. I want to be sure that all users are getting the response time that they deserve,” he says.
Parrish’s arsenal includes 2,000-plus servers and, says one vendor, some of the best technical talent available. “You can ask them any technical question and they’ll know the answer. That’s a company that is able to try out leading-edge technologies,” says Israel L’Heureux, CTO of Campbell, Calif.-based Redline Networks. Redline recently provided DIG with Web I/O Acceleration hardware, which was deployed alongside DIG’s existing server farm to speed up page serves and cut bandwidth costs.
This talent-hardware combo keeps the DIG sites up during extreme traffic spikes. Parrish points to NCAA.com and March Madness. During the 2001 tournament, DIG served nearly 600Mbps and eight million page views an hour.
But not all serve capacity loads can be anticipated. The events of Sept. 11, 2001, brought a 500 percent increase in unique users and a 550 percent increase in page views to ABCNews.com.
Parrish learned about the attacks on the World Trade Center on his way to work and anticipated a traffic surge to the news site. The CTO first called his Seattle datacenter team to swing over additional server space from other units to ABCNews.com.
“They were one step ahead of me. The crew in Seattle and the editorial and design teams in New York were already working to reconfigure our server farm and had the site stripped down for easy loading, minutes after that attack. It was seamless maneuvering under a tremendous amount of pressure,” says the CTO. His remote teams ended up serving more than 15 times the normal load for ABCNews.com.
This move to meet extreme spikes and anticipate future growth of DIG-served sites is part of the CTO’s frontline responsibilities. “I believe that growth must be deliberately and thoughtfully managed and is not unique to the Internet. I spent a lot of my career in packaged goods companies where products became either stars or dogs. The challenge there was to keep just in front of customer demand in a managed way and also be able to cost-effectively shut down operations when that appetite was curbed,” says Parrish who worked as a unit CIO for Polaroid and spent several years in various IT roles for Campbell Soup Company. In addition to bringing in Redline’s technology, Parrish has ensured that the datacenters in Seattle and Orlando, Fla., have the flexibility to reconfigure load service to meet traffic spikes. Each facility can aggregate peak bandwidth of nearly 1Gb with more than 550Mb sustained.
Parrish keeps an eye on costs, preparing for projected traffic increases due to new wireless and broadband channels. “We don’t want to overgrow the network. We don’t want to make each page too expensive,” he says. This will be even more important as broadband brings new user expectations. “There will be more rich media on the Web: … video on demand, movie trailers, online gaming. Clearly for Disney there is a sweet spot — from studios to animation to news.”
