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October 31, 2012

Sandy and Some Internet-Mobile Internet Vignettes with Keynote Systems

We’re probably not alone in giving – or too old to be the only folks to at least have given – some thought over the last several Hurricane Sandy-laced days to one of Bruce Springsteen’s oldest tunes – “4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)” – a 1973 song more or less about Springsteen finally leaving Asbury Park behind, just before hitting it with Born to Run a year or so later.

Here are, we think, the best known lines (and altogether an interesting choice of words):

And Sandy, the aurora is rising behind us
This pier lights our carnival life forever

Hurricane Sandy might have left us with such memorable words in mind. But alas not. Here’s what Asbury Park looked like following its intersection with the 2012 version of Sandy:

Not a pretty picture, and this is one of the tamer images among many. Without a doubt Sandy managed to actually keep up with the pre-storm hype – an unwelcome scenario that hit many people and many businesses that did not believe it would do so. Sandy’s ultimate reality also heavily impacted the Internet – and the mobile Internet – in a number of ways that bear careful analysis.

Many folks turned to the Internet to gather up lots of information – but only after Sandy hit and once it became obvious that the storm would likely prove of catastrophic proportions. Many of these folks were outside the range of the storm – but for those of us actually in the middle of it who subsequently lost our power, or access to our homes through large scale evacuations and flooding (if not fires) – we necessarily ended up having only one option open to us – accessing the Internet through our mobile devices – either going to websites directly or by running mobile Web-based apps that in turn used the Internet to feed the apps.

The combination of an unprecedented “perfect storm” appearing at a technology point in time when almost an entire population is moving to using mobile devices for everything we do, led to some interesting conundrums for businesses that rely heavily on the Internet. To sort through the issues that emerged, we caught up with Shawn White, VP of operations at Keynote Systems – a company well known for measuring every last possible aspect of the Internet – from infrastructure to devices, from wired to unwired ecosystems, and everything in between.

The point here is that Keynote has the base of measurement knowledge to match against the kind of issues arising out of Sandy’s technology wake.

White notes that the very first thing Keynote observed was the following: “The Internet is highly resilient and is designed in such a way as to allow for its operation despite the impact of natural or man-made disasters. This doesn't mean impacts won't be felt locally by those directly in the line of a storm or in those areas where a majority of Internet traffic flows. This is definitely the case with Hurricane Sandy's impact in the New York City area. Keynote's global measurement infrastructure found that almost everyone in and around New York City encountered either full-scale outage with their Internet connectivity or sporadic performance issues. This is true for both Internet users of land-line high-speed Internet connections as well as those accessing the Internet through their mobile phones.”

Of particular interest, even Keynote's own measurement computers in New York experienced outages during the storm that lasted throughout the night. And the data centers where Keynote's measurement computers are located reported sporadic power outages. In one case, onsite generators failed to turn on due to water flooding the generator areas. Keynote's mobile agents, which connect to the Internet through AT&T, Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile, also experienced significant slow-downs or complete service interruptions, as cell towers were affected by power outages and a surge of voice and data traffic.

(There is a lesson here: never place generators in areas that might flood – even if the likelihood of flooding is miniscule.)

White continues, “We found that the websites most impacted were news and media sites as New Yorkers and others throughout the United States were clamoring online to get the latest weather and news related to the storm. Almost every major news outlet was negatively impacted in some way - but specifically CNN, Weather.com, The New York Times, Bloomberg, The Wall Street Journal, and The Los Angeles Times had the most severe slowdowns. For example, Weather.com saw a performance slow-down significantly starting at 1:42pm EDT which lasted until 4:50pm EDT.”

During this time Keynote found that Weather.com was either completely unavailable or taking more than 30 seconds to download the home page, a period of time much longer than most people are willing to wait for a webpage to load. With the New York Time's website, we found that at 1:38pm EDT and 4:33pm EDT, the site encountered a slowdown, but not due to the servers under direct control of The New York Times, but due to third-party content embedded on their home page that was not able to keep up with the traffic load.  

MarketWatch, meanwhile, posted a notice on its homepage saying, "We are experiencing technical difficulties. The full MarketWatch site will return shortly."

Keynote says many retail sites appear to have been less affected. The most popular retail sites are veterans of handling flash floods, no pun intended, of online visitors and holiday shopping events and have the learned the hard way to employ technology and techniques to quickly recover should outages occur anywhere or at any time in the United States.

Keynote's Retail Index data shows no significant performance slowdowns or availability impacts related to Hurricane Sandy.

Of course it is worth noting that perhaps there were 8 million or so people otherwise too occupied with Sandy to be in a position to be surfing retail stores. More likely they were trying to access the news sites noted above. But that is a quibble and nothing more.

Some Lessons worth Learning

Overall, Keynote points out that the Internet weathered the impact of Hurricane Sandy. However there are lessons to be learned for anyone relying upon the Internet and mobile web to conduct business, communicate with online users, or get important information to concerned citizens.  

White suggests the following: “First, it is critically important to build robust business continuity plans around your online presence. This means having your online content and websites available from multiple data centers, in different parts of the United States or world, as well as implementing technologies to allow for quick failover to those redundant data centers. Testing and monitoring of these contingency plans are absolutely important—especially testing and monitoring from where your online users are located, connecting to the Internet from mobile phones and web browsers.

“Second, be sure that any 3rd party content on your web site adheres to the same high expectations and policies you have for your content and servers. Your site might be doing fine but if content from a different provider could bring your entire website to a halt the odds are it probably will. Use external load testing and monitoring to ensure your 3rd party content providers, analytics vendors, and others are living up to your Service Level Agreements (SLA) and that you have monitoring in place to quickly alert you when they don't.

“Finally, recognize the fragility of the mobile web. In highly dense populations, even a single mobile cellular tower taken offline can wreak havoc for everyone in that area. Voice calls, SMS messaging, social media and news updates put a significant stress on existing infrastructures. Be sure to provide multiple ways for your online visitors and customers to connect with you - be it the Web, mobile, phone, or other means.”

The mobile Web in particular, as it quickly moves to become the preferred means by which most users will access the Internet, is already becoming the key component in the overall mix of things White notes. As White also notes, the mobile Web is indeed still quite fragile – and requires, among other things, very tight monitoring of its capabilities, throughput, failover processes and failover infrastructures.

For additional thoughts and insights make sure to also check out, Hurricane Sandy Proves in Every Silver Lining There is a Cloud. Hint: the word “cloud” can be used in more ways than one.

Hurricane Sandy may have been a perfect storm, but Sandy’s wake provides a perfect storm of an opportunity to spend some time applying a critical assessment of both online and mobile Web and Internet capabilities. It isn’t hype – take it seriously.

The future of your business depends on it.




Edited by Braden Becker


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