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The Hard Sell
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The engineering and operations teams at MLB Advanced Media nearly struck out when they tried to sell a two-tier Web infrastructure to upper management at the end of the 2002 season. They were victims of their own success: Although MLB.com's scalability was limited, they had transformed it into a relatively reliable site.
"Everyone was skeptical about two tiers at first," says Justin Shaffer, director of operations for MLB Advanced Media, which built and runs Major League Baseball's Web site.
But everyone also agreed that MLB.com required some big changes. So after pitching the results of a matchup between the two-tier and three-tier models, Shaffer and the engineering teams convinced the company's CTO that the site no longer needed separate application servers.
"We knew we could do it all in a simple server engine," Shaffer says. "But it's always a tough decision to take apart everyone's hard work and start from scratch."
There was no opposition to the Web site overhaul and the addition of content switches. "The NetScaler boxes sold themselves, and we didn't have a lot of choice about our data center move," he says. Shaffer says he was able to squeeze the NetScaler boxes into the budget because they replaced the cost of the hardware encryption cards for SSL.
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