Case Studies: Meebo

Meebo's Goal of "Sharing the Web" Requires a Highly Scalable Solution

Meebo is a start-up that helps people share across the web. Based in Mountain View, California, the company began back in 2005 by offering users a way to consolidate their various Instant Messaging (IM) accounts into a single browser-based program. The company has since expanded its product line by mobilizing its offerings and coming up with new ways to help users navigate the web.

With the goal of providing the "easiest, most open and most 'right there where you want it' way to share on the web," the company's colorful and easy-to-use web-based software products belie an underlying technological sophistication. Meebo's user-friendly software (available at www.meebo.com) enables Internet users to easily share content and communicate in real time with friends, family and associates.

• Meebo Bar connects people to their friends via numerous websites that have installed some simple Meebo Bar code.
• Meebo Messenger consolidates IM (AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, etc.) platforms into a browser-based solution, obviating the need for users to log into multiple IM platforms.
• Meebo Mobile allows users to stay connected to their friends through mobile devices, such as the Apple iPhone and RIM BlackBerry.

Developing a set of solutions to allow users to integrate their IM clients and share content by clicking on a headline, dragging a link, and dropping it onto an IM buddy was no easy feat. But after five years of effort, the work appears to have been worthwhile, as end users and advertisers can't seem to get enough of Meebo.

Growing Demand = Growing Pains

Having recently celebrated its five-year anniversary, the privately-held company has grown from three founders and a handful of developers to more than 125 employees. In addition, Meebo's customer growth has been even more impressive, with the company boasting more than 180 million unique users per month and more than 8,000 websites now supporting the Meebo toolbar.

The company claims to reach 33 percent of the U.S. Internet population and boasts much higher click-through rates for its advertisers than most websites. Meebo CEO, Seth Sternberg, has said in recent interviews that the click-through rates are up to ten times higher than industry norms. All this recent success has attracted the interest of the venture capital community, and the company just announced in November that it had closed a Series D round of funding for an additional $27.5 million.

In Search of a Scalability

Meebo's recently announced "Meebo MiniBar" service is a downloadable browser extension that consolidates a user's online activity into a single browser session. The MiniBar enables visitors to check in to their favorite sites and share their discoveries with friends or with those who have similar interests. In using the MiniBar browser extension, users find they no longer need to log in and out of websites as frequently as they normally would. With the check-in feature, Meebo users essentially subscribe to online "channels" and the Meebo servers push out new content when it becomes available.

This design requires "server push" technologies that use "long polling". For this reason, the web sessions of Meebo users need to be "sticky" or "persistent". Simon Yeo, Senior Director of Operations at Meebo, says user sessions with his company's servers have an average duration of approximately 90 minutes and can sometimes last for several days.

The persistent "long polling" sessions (along with the rapid growth in traffic) created problems for the Brocade/Foundry ServerIron load balancers that Meebo had recently installed. Although the ServerIrons were only a year old, their CPU utilization rates quickly went from 10-20 percent (when first deployed) to being maxed out at 100 percent just a year later.

It was around this time that Meebo started researching alternatives within the load balancing space. Yeo said they needed a solution that would scale better than the ServerIron appliances, "Ultimately, it was the combination of performance, reliability, and cost that led us to the A10 AX Series Application Delivery Controllers."

Meebo's network uses industry-standard routers and top-of-rack switches. Dell and Iron Systems servers are used, as well as SQL databases, and a homegrown back-end coded with C and C++. To handle the traffic and tie the servers to the user community, Meebo has deployed four A10 Networks' 64-bit AX 2500 Application Delivery Controllers, which represent a new generation of server load balancers.

Meebo's Logical Network

AX Series: Advanced Technology at a Low Price

Meebo attributed their decision to purchase AX 2500 appliances to the following benefits:

• Price/Performance: When compared with one of the newer, competitively-priced ServerIron models, the AX 2500 offered a superior value. The AX appliance supports three times the number of Layer 4 connections per second, four times the number of Layer 7 requests per second, and twice as many concurrent sessions as the ServerIron. In addition, the AX 2500 offers 10 Gbps total throughput, compared to 5 Gbps for the ServerIron. The cost per Gbps for the AX was less than half that of the ServerIron.
• 64-bit Scalability: The AX appliances were capable of handling the large number of persistent sessions that Meebo required, by virtue of the AX's advanced 64-bit architecture. With a 64-bit Advanced Core Operating System (ACOS) and 64-bit hardware, the AX can offer more addressable memory than the competition.
• Reliability: The AX Series offered a host of features to ensure maximum reliability. For example, the AX offers internally-redundant components to ensure that the Layer 4/7 device can fail over efficiently. The AX Series also offers carrier class features such as hot-swappable, redundant power supplies, a removable fan tray, SSD memory, and on-board compact flash, values not normally seen at this price point. The AX also offers higher Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF) numbers than the competition.

Success: A10 Offering Solutions to Scale with Long Sessions

Since choosing A10, Meebo is benefitting from the affordability, reliability, and performance of the AX Series solution. Yeo has also said Meebo is pleased with the purchase of their AX 2500s and that they "would not hesitate to purchase additional A10 products".

About AX Series

A10 Networks' AX Series is the industry's best price/performance advanced traffic manager – helping enterprises and ISPs maximize application availability through a high-performance and scalable web Application Delivery platform. The AX's Advanced Core Operating System (ACOS) architecture has garnered the company numerous awards and is revolutionary by market standards due to its scalable symmetrical multiprocessing (SSMP), shared memory architecture. AX includes an optimized multi-CPU architecture built from the ground up that leaps ahead of the competition in terms of performance, scalability, and reliability. For more information, visit: www.a10networks.com/products/axseries

About A10 Networks

A10 Networks was founded in 2004 with a mission to provide innovative networking and security solutions. A10 Networks makes high-performance products that help organizations accelerate, optimize and secure their applications. A10 Networks is headquartered in Silicon Valley with offices in the United States, United Kingdom, France, The Netherlands, Germany, Brazil, Japan, China, Korea and Taiwan.