In the first joint project between FTI and punkt.de, sonnenklar.tv was to be relaunched on a TYPO3 basis. FTI received a recommendation for punkt.de: "If anyone can do it, they can!"

FTI Frosch Touristik GmbH operates sonnenklar.tv, a travel home shopping channel. The technical reach is a total of 31.8 million television households. Of these, sonnenklar.tv reaches 18.8 million households via satellite and 12.9 million television households via cable. Additional program windows on private television stations increase the reach.

The initial situation

Sonnenklar.tv broadcasts more than 40 hours of live programming per week. The program can be received 24 hours a day on its own channel via cable and satellite and is also offered as a live stream on the Internet. The offer ranges from package tours and round trips to last-minute trips as well as scheduled and charter flights.

Sonnenklar.tv pursues a multi-channel strategy in which travel is offered not only via TV, call centers and travel agencies under the sonnenklar.tv brand, but also on the Internet at www.sonnenklar.tv. At peak times, sonnenklar.tv reaches peaks of 1 million page impressions, particularly at broadcasting times on weekends and public holidays.

Due to the high number of visitors, a server quickly reaches its limits. punkt.de has distributed the onslaught evenly across several servers by using load balancers (clustering).

The solution

"That was impressive: right from our first meeting, punkt.de understood exactly what we needed. In some respects, our expectations were even exceeded."

Throughput and scalability of the system were realized by clustering in a TYPO3 environment as follows:

• Use of commercially available front-end web servers with the aim of almost linear scalability.
• Each web server is connected to the Internet via Fast Ethernet, so that 100 Mbit/sec. is achieved per system. The number of systems is increased as required. By limiting the bandwidth, a single web server is not pushed to the limit of its capacity.
• Use of redundant load balancers capable of processing gigabit data throughputs to distribute the data to the server farm.
• Connection of the load balancers to the provider in the Gigabit Ethernet area.
• The redundant high-end database servers are oversized to provide capacity for additional front-end web servers.
• Each web server receives a dedicated Gigabit Ethernet connection to the database server in order to keep latencies low.
• A common file system for all TYPO3 servers has been eliminated. The data is stored separately on the individual servers.
• The flexible configurability of the cache server used makes it possible to precisely adapt the retention times to the current online content depending on the content retrieved.

Back-end processing takes place on a single editorial server. Thanks to the shared database, all content stored there is immediately accessible from all front-end servers.

Data in the file system is replicated from the editorial server to all other servers using rsync. As the customer was very happy with an update interval of just a few minutes, it was decided not to set up a central storage system and the associated complexity and susceptibility to errors.

The architecture used at a glance

Problem solving

Clustering in the TYPO3 environment is difficult for any software developer because standard-compliant programming is not possible. Sources of error arise that are difficult to trace. In some cases, it is no longer possible to fall back on existing solutions; in-house developments are indispensable in many places.

punkt.de was able to fully meet the group's requirements and ensure cross-platform synergy effects for FTI, which also works with TYPO3 solutions.