Optimized traffic routing ensures no stop at any hop for Orvis.com

As the population of online consumers has expanded, so has the network that links web users to web sites. Chances are it’s not a single, dedicated ISP that connects an online shopper to an e-retailer’s site, but a series of providers that pass connections between each other depending on where the user is located relative to the web site’s server. And it’s the glitches that can occur along those multiple connection points at each hop that made Orvis.com turn to Internap Network Solutions’ Flow Control Platform for help, Sean Warner, senior system analyst, tells Internet Retailer.

Though happening only very occasionally—perhaps two or three times in the past two or three years— “Every time some ISP can`t get to Orvis.com, that is a couple of thousand customers,” Warner says. Orvis uses Keynote Systems to measure web site and application performance from locations throughout the country, but if Keynote identifies an outage at a local ISP trying to connect to Orvis’s own ISP, for example, resolving the problem at the local carrier is beyond Orvis’s control.

What Orvis can do, however, is immediately re-route traffic around the obstruction to ensure that customers affected can still reach Orvis.com, a service Internap has been providing to the retailer since last year. A replacement for the standard method of routing, border gateway protocol, which follows the shortest or most direct route across network connections, Internap’s optimized routing system seeks the best. For Orvis, that means it probes possible connections from Orvis.com servers to the online customer`s network, and automatically routes traffic along whichever connections responds fastest.

The probe tests connections every time Orvis’s web server sees a request from a new prefix, Warner says: for example, a series of requests to the server coming in from the same ISP wouldn’t launch the probe, but a request from a different ISP at the end of the string would. The probe can signal that a problem is developing by tracking gradual drops in response times over network connections before they break down altogether. In such cases, Internap’s technology starts rerouting traffic around the trouble spot before affected customers may even be aware of a problem. The company notes the device can also optimize routing according to business rules set by the retailer to balance connection cost and connection performance.

“If a customer can get to our site with a 2-second response time and it takes him 2.5 seconds on everyone else’s site, that`s a better shopping experience on our site,” says Warner. “But that’s an added benefit of having the Internap device. The bigger reason was to reroute around these outages. And it does it automatically, in real time. We don’t have to wait until someone tells us there is a problem.”