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Massachusetts Port Authority

The Client:

The Massachusetts Port Authority (Massport) is the independent public authority that oversees a large portion of the transportation infrastructure in Massachusetts. Massport's Logan Airport is the seventeenth busiest airport in the U.S. based on passenger volume. The most active airport in the New England area, it serves more than 26 million passengers and handles over 800 million pounds of cargo and mail a year.

The Content Engineering Challenge:

When the Logan Airport Web site was re-designed in May of 1999, it was an instant success. So much so, it was straining to keep up with the demand. Users flocked to the real-time fight information on www.massport.com on a regular basis, but especially when the airport experienced flight delays due to weather or other causes. The site was originally projected to support 10,000 unique visitors a month. It was soon receiving 100,000 unique visitors a month, and in severe weather, well over 10,000 unique visitors a day!

Massport sought out Pandora Systems, whose founders were the original architects of the system, to engineer a solution to keep up with the unexpected demand.

Our Solution:

Pandora Systems re-architected Logan Airport’s real-time flight information web application from the ground up to take advantage of the latest technology and to distribute their substantial load across multiple servers.

The flight information application was re-designed to utilize XML technology, which will facilitate the inclusion of flight data from additional sources including Hanscom Field, Worcester Airport, and the FAA. The XML based design was also chosen to prepare the data to be repurposed for mobile devices and syndication to other web-based portals.

The original system infrastructure was converted from a single NT server to a Windows 2000 Web farm with Cisco Local Director load balancing to distribute requests across available servers.

In addition, Pandora developed a custom content management system for Massport that allowed for centralized editing of site content that is then pushed to the production server farm.

Their Benefits:

• The re-designed system has an increased load capacity of at least a factor of ten and is noticeably faster. The new system has easily handled usage surges of up to 20,000 unique visitors a day.
• The system is horizontally scaleable - new web servers can easily be added. This will be particularly important when the system includes real-time flight data from regional airports.
• The system is easily maintained through a custom-designed content management system that allows non-technical Massport personnel to update all web content including jobs, news, FAQs, traffic updates, and contract opportunities.

For more information on Pandora Systems' services, please contact Jay Rothschild.

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