Casa Editorial El Tiempo (CEET) has been in the publishing business for almost 100 years. During this time, it has positioned products such as the El Tiempo, Portafolio and Hoy newspapers, Cambio, Aló, Enter and Don Juan magazines, regional weeklies and local television channel City TV, among others.

In July 2006, CEET re-launched its portal, eltiempo.com (the leading portal in Colombia), with the idea of transforming its concept into a more dynamic model that would also permit community participation. The new portal’s success was such that it led CEET to reformulate the Web platform’s architecture.

The Challenge: Supporting Growth while Maintaining Control Over Infrastructure

Currently, eltiempo.com has approximately 50 percent of total portal traffic in Colombia. The portal has a daily average of two million page views, 350,000 visits and 250,000 exclusive users, with peaks that can add an additional 50 to 75 percent to these figures.

Managing the portal with the most traffic in Colombia presented a challenge for CEET. Due to the traffic levels achieved after the new portal’s launch, CEET needed to optimize its platform to enable management of greater bandwidth and capacity to service the higher volume of daily visits.

Implementing Citrix NetScaler

At the end of 2006 after various alternatives had been analyzed, and on the basis of the results obtained through an advanced pilot test with support from Access Team, a Gold Citrix® Solution Advisor in Colombia, the Citrix® NetScaler® Application Switch solution was chosen since its set of features exceeded expectations.

“We had more traffic on our portal and we had to choose a solution that would help us to efficiently administer the traffic load along with user response time and quality of service. For this reason, we decided to stay with the NetScaler solution,” noted Juan Carlos Agudelo, CEET’s business technology manager.

Optimizing Delivery of the Portal

With NetScaler capacities such as caching, load balancing, layer 4-7 content switching and optimization of communications protocols, CEET has been able to achieve a simpler, more flexible and more efficient infrastructure to respond to the demands of its new portal.

“The traffic volume that it can handle allowed us to scale up the infrastructure to the bandwidth levels required to service the new demand,” affirmed Agudelo. “We’ve also obtained benefits such as stability of operations and service availability.”

Also, the ability to integrate business logic into the technical infrastructure allowed CEET to redistribute its services in order to optimize them and to specialize existing resources, which has resulted in improved utilization of all installed infrastructure. For example, dynamic and static content has been separated to more specifically optimize each group of servers, while Citrix NetScaler is responsible for making decisions on how to service each Web requirement more efficiently.

Regarding the economic benefits to CEET, Agudelo stated that if the NetScaler solution had not been implemented, the company would have had to increase its cost for installed computing capacity by at least 30 percent, which means that they are receiving a return on their Citrix investment.

Improving the User Experience

Since users’ connections terminate in the Citrix NetScaler appliance and many requirements are serviced from the cache, there has been a substantial improvement in response time, leading to better service for users.

“Our portal went from a highly static to a dynamic model, featuring more updates and greater community participation — that is to say, a streamlined portal with its own life,” stated Agudelo.

CEET has also gained the ability to handle peaks in demand following high-impact news that generates massive reader traffic into the portal. Citrix NetScaler administers Web server load thresholds, enabling the infrastructure to provide adequate service, and allowing it to define action policies when these thresholds are exceeded.

Future Plans

By taking advantage of the proximity and Global Server Load Balancing features provided by the Citrix NetScaler solution, CEET is planning to bring its content closer to its readers abroad. For example, if a reader connects from Europe, Citrix NetScaler connects him to the closest server that has the best availability according to his connection location.

Agudelo concluded, “Also, the capacity to establish prioritization policies will allow us to integrate the infrastructure for vertical businesses, such as metrocuadrado.com, elempleo.com, clasificar.com and guiaacademica.com, into one single infrastructure, while guaranteeing that each business will have the resources it requires, even when there are surges in demand.”

©2008 Citrix Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. Citrix® and Citrix® NetScaler® are registered trademarks of Citrix systems, Inc. and/or one or more of its subsidiaries and may be registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries. All other trademarks and registered trademarks are property of their respective owners.