TESTIMONIALS: What They Said
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Rush Order Inc. Maintains 24x7 Uptime for Top E-Commerce Customers with Coyote Point's Equalizer
As one of the Internet's pioneering fulfillment houses, Rush Order Inc. (www.rushorder.com) is literally the business end of some of Silicon Valley's leading high tech companies. By hosting its customers' e-commerce back end, Rush Order holds their reputations in its hands - - or more precisely, on its servers. The core functions that Rush Order undertakes are prime determinants of customer satisfaction-among them, online ordering, credit card processing, order fulfillment, worldwide shipping, and inventory control. For Rush Order itself, then, everything depends of 24x7 uptime, swift page downloads, and reliable sticky connections during transaction processing.
To secure the reliability and efficiency of its infrastructure in advance of the 1999 holiday season, Rush Order went shopping for a load balancing solution. After competitive testing, the company settled on Coyote Point's Equalizer as the best technology available to guarantee fail-safe, 24x7 access to its mission-critical services.
Equalizer, an intelligent load balancing appliance, routes incoming traffic among server clusters, using multiple criteria to determine which server is best equipped to take each hit. Equalizer provides failover by detecting server failure and automatically bypassing failed servers. Active Content Verification tests all components of each server in each cluster, ensuring that not only server hardware but the server operating system and application software are fully operational.
Continuous Holiday-Season Uptime
Rush Order purchased a preconfigured Equalizer E250 and deployed it the day it was received in August, 1999. Since then, "we've had zero downtime due to equipment failure," says Patrik Ahlin, Rush Order's CIO. "At one point, one of our servers was down for two days, and our customers had no idea. Equalizer routed incoming traffic around the down server without any detectable service degradation."
In addition to providing server failover, Equalizer kept traffic flowing smoothly during the record-breaking 1999 holiday season. "Our peak came in November, when at one point we processed well over 200,000 users in a 3-day period for just one of our clients. All that bandwidth usage went off without a hitch," said Mr. Ahlin.
An upgrade to Equalizer 4.0 deployed in early January, 2000 added the capability to maintain sticky connections across clusters, returning site visitors who had input data-in a credit card transaction, for example- to the server where their data was stored. "Intercluster stickiness saved my hide," said Mr. Ahlin. "It enables site visitors to move from nonsecure to secure connections without loss of input data — a loss that causes considerable frustration to the customer if you allow it to occur."
The upgrade also provided the capability to connect an unlimited number of IP addresses to one interface. Mr. Ahlin easily reconfigured Equalizer to bond Rush Order's two Class C ranges of IP addresses to the external interface, allowing Rush Order to route incoming traffic to both sets of IP numbers. "That greatly increased the scalability of the box," said Mr. Ahlin.
The reconfiguration aside, Equalizer has been a zero-maintenance product. "I leave it alone, and it hums away-and so does our entire infrastructure," Mr. Ahlen said. "Equalizer has provided some real peace of mind-we know that the system can compensate for any component failure, taking the angst out of troubleshooting and upgrading. I can't think of another piece of hardware that offers a comparable bang for the buck."
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