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F E A T U R E

MMS: The Muscle Behind the Life Time Fitness Machine

July 8, 2002
By James Hutchinson

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The Building Blocks

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	In this article
	Introduction
	The Building Blocks
	Onward and Upward
	Environmental Concerns
	Web Services Glossary
	From the Ground Up
	Related Sites
	Best Practices

MMS 1.0 had two main architecture components: a client configuration based on Windows 98 running Internet Explorer 5.0, and a Web, application and database server infrastructure. The clients were local to each club; the server architecture resided at corporate. The Web servers, running Apache 1.3, served client requests, while the Tomcat 3.1 code handled servlets being fed to the application server. The application server ran BEA Systems' WebLogic Server 5.1, which controlled all EJBs (Enterprise JavaBeans). FreeBSD was the core OS on which the Web and application servers ran. The file server's performance characteristics and the cost of FreeBSD made this setup a no-brainer for Life Time. The database was Microsoft SQL Server 7.0, and directory services were handled by Sun ONE Directory Server (formerly Netscape LDAP and iPlanet Directory Server) running on Windows NT 4.0.

This architecture went live in August 2000 and supported the conversion of all Life Time clubs outside Minnesota. That's because a major goal of MMS was to let members use any Life Time facility. And since most members are enrolled in Minnesota facilities, these clubs were most likely to use this cross-club perk. Therefore, they were scheduled last and a controlled, learn-as-you-go approach was taken using out-of-state clubs as a test.

This proved to be a smart move when problems with MMS 1.0 surfaced. Scalability and performance concerns made Life Time rethink the base architecture. The WebLogic server wasn't stable, and BEA was not very helpful because it did not support FreeBSD. Gary Lien, Life Time's senior systems analyst, said the company was "forced" to move WebLogic to NT 4.0 as a workaround, with the goal to get the server onto a Solaris platform as soon as possible.

Changing of the Guard

Or, more like 'Call in the guards!' The lead developer and tester for MMS 1.0 bolted one month before it was due to go live. Talk about stress training. Life Time employees had to pay a visit to the developer's home to retrieve key code required for the launch.

Web server performance was also a major concern. The Tomcat Java servlet software would freeze occasionally. The solution: Move it off the Apache Web server and onto its own Solaris x86 platform. Two servers were added to help distribute the expected load when Minnesota was brought online.

Another core performance issue involved the database. All reporting functions were performed on the live production database; this led to intermittent slowdowns. So Life Time installed a second SQL server as a reporting database and set up replication from the main production database. The last major glitch centered around serving images to the club registration clients. To help curb fraud at check-in, digital images of all members are stored in a repository. Serving those images from corporate across the WAN brought unacceptable latency, so the company installed image proxy servers, based on FreeBSD 4.2 and Squid, at each club. The proxies are seeded from the central image store regularly, and the club client machines are configured to access the proxies for all image calls. Display speeds increased dramatically.

Moment of Truth

These problems were identified by November 2000, and plans for MMS 2.0 were born. Once 2.0 was fully baked, Life Time could bring its primary Minnesota membership online. The conversion took place in June 2001, and the IT staff's hard knocks and tinkering paid off.

"We were expecting a tsunami," Bertch says, but "got a ripple." Data conversion from the old platform took 12 hours, and because Life Time had cleaned up inaccurate records, data integrity was high.

However, not everything went smoothly during the Minnesota go-live. For example, a misconfigured SAN let multiple applications write to the same data store, thus corrupting that area. But the technology problems paled in comparison with the personnel issues. Just before MMS 1.0 went live, the lead contractors in charge of development and testing left abruptly--taking some strategic intellectual property. It took a trip to the developer's house to retrieve much of the code, but Lien says they were able to "hack through it and get it to compile."