sherrike@microsoft.com

Microsoft.com, is the world’s largest corporate website both in terms of site visitors and pages served. Overall, it is the fourth-largest website in total visitors behind America Online, Yahoo and Netscape. We offer 250,000 pages of content, viewable in all major browser versions (yes, we aggressively support Netscape), supported by three server farms internationally and featuring content updated as often as every three hours, seven days a week.

Barely two years ago, we were fortunate to attract 50,000 visitors a day. We operated with two HTTP servers, one FTP server and one 45mb DS3 Circuit.

Today, we operate on 16 servers with 8 45mb DS3 circuits, averaging 50,000 simultaneous page requests. Our 1.3 million daily users generate 176 million hits a day.

We have local content for 52 countries in a total of 28 different languages. Some 300 Microsoft content groups publish on Microsoft.com. To improve customer access worldwide, we have opened two new International Data Centers in London and Tokyo, providing mirrored content in closer proximity to our customers.

We could not have achieved the rapid growth we have experienced without the help of a series of innovative tools and processes. This session will discuss the architecture of Microsoft.com today and tomorrow. We will discuss the data management and transaction processing challenges we've faced along the way and the solutions we deployed to reach the next step in our explosive growth.