The Zeus Blog: Application Delivery, Cloud Computing, Load Balancing, Virtualization

Fly Traffic Management

It’s been great to see such good traction with the media around our appointment by STA Travel. We have started working with the company to provide their users with a much faster and highly accessible website. Given that STA Travel told us their site is subject to 5,000 hits per minute (and that’s just in EMEA), it’s hardly surprising that the site was getting pretty busy for their users at peak times.

The travel sector may have been hit hard during the recession, but recent research has suggested that online holiday bookings are still growing. A report from the European Travel Index from the Centre for Economics and Business Research says that the Internet remains a strategic driver for holiday spending and continues to be the biggest area of growth within the travel industry. Some 54 per cent of all web users across Europe research and book travel related services through the Internet. The findings go on to say that online travel spend across Europe has climbed from €58.4bn in 2008 to €66.9bn in 2009, and is predicted to reach €74.3bn by the end of 2010.

So with the online travel industry continuing to grow, the post recession consumer is still looking to book holidays this year. However, travel companies should note that a poor online experience may cause them to turn to competitors if a website fails to deliver the services it ought. When faced with the prospect of extra traffic, this can lead many companies to believe that the only way they can afford to cope with busy periods is to have the necessary hardware in place just in case the site becomes overloaded.

STA Travel chose Zeus over alternative hardware-based products, because our software solution allows STA Travel to quickly scale up the resource they needed as and when required.  This is far more cost-effective than investing in hardware that is only used at busy times. By putting the software solution in place to deal with peaks in visitors, the company can also be rest assured that customer loyalty issues do not come as a  result of poorly managed traffic.

Case Study Of The Week - Bango

For Bango, there’s only one load balancing and application traffic management solution...ZXTM from Zeus

“With a Microsoft-centric infrastructure, we needed a traffic manager capable of integrating with our existing IT investments. We use sessions a lot in our applications, so being able to use TrafficScript™ to build session persistence rules based on .Net and IIS was another huge advantage for us. At any moment, we may have tens of thousands of users and the ability to easily configure ZXTM with TrafficScript™ means we don’t have to be Linux experts." Ray Anderson, CEO of Bango.

Bango, based in Cambridge, UK, makes it easy for businesses to drive traffic to a mobile website, understand who their visitors are, track marketing campaigns and collect payment for digital content world-wide.

Case Study Of The Week - Blue State Digital

Zeus Technology, Blue State Digital and the Barack Obama phenomenon

When the now U.S. President Barack Obama was in the middle of his presidential campaign, he retained Blue State Digital (BSD) to manage the online fundraising, constituency-building, issue advocacy, and peer-to-peer online networking aspects of his 2008 Presidential campaign. BSD selected Zeus Technology’s software to ensure that BSD’s customers receive outstanding service and consistent availability during their peak fundraising activities.

“We’re in the business of raising money for our clients and managing the software for social networking for grassroots political initiatives,” explains Leigh Heyman, Lead System Administrator at Blue State Digital. “Since implementing Zeus, our overall site traffic has increased by 400%, yet traffic to our backend nodes has only increased by 75%, while simultaneously reducing the burden on the applications by 80%.We can now do things with our applications that we wouldn’t have otherwise been able to do.

Blue State Digital (BSD) is a leader in online fundraising, advocacy, social networking and constituency development programs for nonprofit organizations, political candidates and causes.

Case Study Of The Week - Rapattoni

250+ websites roar with speed using ZXTM’s content compression and application acceleration

For Rapattoni, three key factors in finding a suitable network performance solution were: 1) highly efficient content compression without sacrificing speed, 2) scalability for future growth and 3) platform flexibility. Rapattoni had become discouraged with proprietary networking hardware that was inflexible and quickly fell behind Moore’s Law in terms of speed.

“For us, it’s all about flexibility of deployment and Zeus is clearly the most flexible solution in the market,” said Isaac Abecassis, CIO of Rapattoni. “We want an environment that scales with our growth.

Rapattoni Corporation provides an array of integrated products and services for U.S. real estate associations and MLS (multiple listing service) organizations and has been serving the industry since 1970. Founded by Andy and Niki Rapattoni, the company provides cutting-edge technology, and excellent customer service has always been the company’s focus.

Case Study Of The Week - Rodgers Townsend

Rodgers Townsend boost customers’ website speeds by 75 percent using Zeus' ZXTM VA within their VMware environment

“I have long been a fan of virtualization,” explained Jonathan Knorr, IT Director for Rodgers Townsend. “It breaks down the barriers between proprietary hardware and software and makes clustering much easier, opening up virtually limitless possibilities. Very important for us is the fact that redundancy is no longer limited to the physical layer."

Rodgers Townsend are a full-service, business-to-business advertising agency, offering creative online marketing and strategy, along with website design and web hosting. To fully support their large and increasingly tech-savvy clients, Rodgers Townsend implemented a virtualized environment to deliver high quality services, while keeping IT costs and labor hours as low as possible.