ON24 Eliminates Service Disruptions for More Than 25,000 Online Events Each Year, Improves System Performance
 
 

ON24 Eliminates Service Disruptions for More Than 25,000 Online Events Each Year, Improves System Performance

  • Oracle Customer:  ON24
    Location:  San Francisco, CA, United States
    Industry:  Professional Services
    Employees:  250

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ON24 provides a full range of cloud-based Webcasting and virtual communications solutions to more than 700 global organizations in publishing, technology, life sciences, government, and financial services—helping them to communicate with employees, clients, prospects, and partners with measurable impact. ON24’s customers use its solutions for corporate and marketing initiatives, such as demand generation, conferences, events, product launches, training, continuing education, internal communications, and executive announcements.

Quality and high availability of the ON24 platform is critical for the company’s business. ON24 Webcasts and virtual events run continuously through the day and any interruptions or even short degradations in system performance create major inconveniences for the around-the-clock, software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform and its users. Further, by nature, the system’s load has a tendency to change frequently and quickly, literally growing from few hundred active users to tens of thousands in a matter of minutes, if not faster. To address these demands, ON24 implemented Oracle Coherence, integrating it with Oracle WebLogic Server’s ActiveCache, to enable ON24 to store users’ HTTP sessions on the grid for improved system performance and reliability. The solution enabled ON24 to eliminate service disruptions—for improved customer satisfaction—and reduce the hours spent on tuning and traffic switches by more than 90% each month.

 
 

 
 

Challenges

A word from ON24

  • “ON24’s SaaS platform implementation is centered on Oracle WebLogic Server and Oracle Coherence. The strategic decision for this was made based on proven, solid performance of these products and the high level of trust that ON24 places in Oracle.” – Alexander Livitz, Senior Performance Architect, ON24

  • Provide 100% service availability to attendees and end users for more than 25,000 events each year, including Webcasts, event portals, virtual events, and virtual environments
  • Provide an architectural framework to more easily segment traffic, automatically directing similar traffic to specific technology resources for improved performance
  • Reduce system-tuning complexity
  • Eliminate service interruptions and performance degradations, while providing the flexibility needed to support fluctuating demand that can grow from a few hundred active users to tens of thousands in a matter of minutes

Solutions

Oracle Product and Services

  • Implemented Oracle Coherence, integrating it with Oracle WebLogic Server’s ActiveCache, to enable ON24 to store end-user HTTP sessions on the grid for improved system performance and reliability
  • Enabled each individual Oracle WebLogic Server to process close to 1,000 requests each second without visible performance degradation
  • Provided continuous availability and high performance for 25,000 of its customers’ events each year, with one single event having as many as 30,000 concurrent users
  • Minimized service disruptions, including planned outages—improving customer satisfaction
  • Used Oracle Coherence to monitor system load and utilization, provide incident alerts, and maintain historical data
  • Reduced worker hours spent on tuning and traffic switches by more than 90% each month
  • Provided unprecedented scalability, enabling ON24 to roll traffic between clusters or change cluster size on the fly

Why Oracle

ON24 had used Oracle WebLogic Server for quite some time. WebLogic’s performance, reliability, and high availability features placed it at the top of the marketplace’s application server lineup. Server manageability and monitoring capabilities were also important factors for choosing WebLogic. Further, seamless integration with other Oracle products minimized typical integration pains.

The company decided to implement Oracle Coherence, integrating it with Oracle WebLogic Server to provide a central storage location that is accessible from any connected client node and making it clear which WebLogic server in the cluster is processing a segment of a given transaction.

“This unique technology is only provided by Oracle and integrates well with ON24’s existing WebLogic infrastructure,” said Alexander Livitz, senior performance architect, ON24 “Oracle Coherence is known for its high performance, high availability, and scalability—making it a great match for the strict requirements of the ON24 SaaS platform.

In addition, the flexibility of the Oracle licensing model, as well as support options, made choosing Oracle WebLogic Server and Oracle Coherence not only the best functional choice, but also a cost-effective option.”

Implementation Process

ON24 completed the entire project in four months by involving collaboration between different teams within organization, including those involved in software development, performance, network operations and quality assurance. Because it is pre-integrated with Oracle Coherence, implementing Oracle WebLogic’s ActiveCache feature was straightforward. The product worked well, practically out-of-the-box. However, time was required to thoroughly test the solution, complete comparative performance analysis, define and develop traffic segregation rules, allocate hardware resources, and build automation scripts.

Partner

 ON24 worked with SL Corporation to monitor its Oracle Coherence Solution, using SL RTView.

“SL RTTView is the best Oracle Coherence monitoring solution out there,” Livitz said. “Its rich graphics show our cluster as a whole, rather than requiring us to monitor each server individually.”