TESTIMONIALS: What They Said
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StudentUniverse.com Achieves Stellar Site Performance, Usage Surge with Layer 7-enabled Equalizer 7.0
For the first generation of college students to grow up on the Internet, nothing could be more natural than going online to find the best travel deals. StudentUniverse.com, a travel ecommerce site catering exclusively to college students and faculty, combines an old invention - the student discount - and a new one - web-based comparison shopping - to provide the best available prices on airfares, lodging, and other travel-related services.
Students are a demanding clientele when it comes to web performance. Well-versed in web-searching, they will swiftly abandon a site that performs slow searches or interrupts transactions. That makes state-of-the-art Internet Traffic Management (ITM) mission-critical for StudentUniverse.com.
StudentUniverse.com has three core ITM requirements: 1) high availability, which entails automatically bypassing downed servers so that visitors never experience a service break; 2) intelligent load balancing, which uses multiple criteria to route incoming requests with maximum efficiency among a pool of servers; and 3) session stickiness, which ensures that users engaged in transactions or other dynamic interactions are not suddenly shifted from one server to another, interrupting the exchange of data.
By fall 2002, with three years of ecommerce under its belt, StudentUniverse.com had mastered two of these three requirements. "Layer 4" load balancing solutions - first Cisco's LocalDirector, and then the more cost-efficient Linux LVS open source load balancing software - had provided high availability and reasonably efficient traffic distribution.
But session stickiness remained problematic. Working only at the transport level, L4 load balancing cannot uniquely identify visitors from the large ISPs, which 'screen' their users' IP addresses behind proxy servers. While using L4 solutions, StudentUniverse.com could maintain session stickiness only by acquiring network addresses associated with each ISP one-by-one - and then manually instructing the load balancer to always send users coming from a given ISP to the same server. This address collection is a never-ending, labor-intensive process.
Cookie-Stuffing at a Great Price
The solution was plainly layer 7 load balancing, which examines incoming traffic at the application level and therefore can inspect cookies sent by user browsers. Based on cookies, users can access their data from different locations even as their source IP address changes and continue to connect to the same server as before, a key feature for e-commerce and other sites that must keep session data across multiple pages. The main barrier to this critical technology was cost. Layer 7 ITM solutions from F5 and [Radware] begin at $20,000 and range as high as $54,000 for redundant pairs.
That's why StudentUniverse.com jumped at the opportunity to serve as a beta customer for Coyote Point System's Layer 7-enabled Equalizer 7.0. Since 1998, Coyote Point has produced robust, intelligent load balancing appliances available at a fraction of the cost of comparable products. By adding layer 7 capability to its mid-range E-350 and high-end E-450 load balancing appliances, priced at $5995 and $9995 respectively, Coyote Point offered an affordable solution to StudentUniverse.com's need to maintain session stickiness. E-350 and E-450 can handle an unlimited number of clusters containing up to 16 (E-350) or 64 (E-450) servers each and an unlimited number of virtual IP addresses, with an aggregate bandwidth of 200 Mbps and 8500 connections per second.
Layer 7 Opens the Floodgates
In early 2003, StudentUniverse.com began test-driving an L7-enabled E-350. By February, the site had achieved stable layer 7-based session persistence in conjunction with round-robin load balancing. Within another few weeks, the adaptive load balancing algorithms - response time, active sessions, direct server measurements, and server weighting - were also up and running. Response time was at its all-time best handling traffic, spiking to 15,000 connections per hour with no latency problems. And the labor and anxiety of manual IP address collection was a thing of the past.
The combination of assured session persistence and improved performance paid an immediate business dividend. "Usage surged as soon as we went live with layer 7-enabled cookie stuffing," said Bob Farrell, StudentUniverse.com's network manager. "Since we got Equalizer 7.0 up and running, students and faculty are plainly letting their friends know about us at a faster clip than ever before."
StudentUniverse.com, in its turn, is letting friends know about the L7-enabled Equalizer 7.0. "I think it's terrific that Coyote Point has incorporated this essential function into a product that was already a cost-effective, trouble-free network management tool," said Mr. Farrell. "These days, when no company is ashamed to demand top value for its dollar, Coyote Point should be on any network administrator's radar."
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