Load Balancer Featured Article

Emergency Reporting Finds Happiness with Coyote Point Load Balancer

By David Sims, TMCnet Contributing Editor

A recent customer case study from load balancer leader Coyote Point Systems (News - Alert) underlines the importance of streamlining the response process for first responders in emergency situations. As the study puts it, “cutting down on the steps required to submit a case allows first responders to focus on saving lives, not filling out forms.”

An organization called Emergency Reporting, a pioneer in centralized Web-based reporting and management systems for first responders, was looking to increase the efficiency of their operations. One way to do that was to deploy redundant Coyote Point Equalizer E350GXs into their network. In addition to allowing for more efficiency, the load balancer optimized application performance and “completely eliminated downtime,” company officials said.  

Emergency Reporting’s value-add is that by integrating the national fire and EMS dataset standards, they can provide a centralized system that minimizes complexity.

Last February the company migrated to a new data center, deploying two load balancers from a low-cost provider. Guess what: Network problems ensued.

“We moved to a new high-end data center in order to guarantee our customers improved stability,” noted Steve Stedman, CTO for Emergency Reporting.

Obviously the quality was suffering due to the lower quality load balancers. “After weeks of battling with [a competing load balancer] offshore support team, more than 40 phone calls and no resolution in sight, Emergency Reporting was eventually forced to replace the units,” company officials said.

Parenthetically, when have you ever heard somebody say “Yeah, we went with the lower quality guys and it really worked out great for us, we’re glad we saved the money?”

So Emergency Reporting put in a couple of Coyote Point Equalizer E350GXs to manage traffic across 25 Hyper-V (virtual) servers running Microsoft (News - Alert) IIS, and was able to speed up application performance and response times while ensuring the security of sensitive information.

Earlier this month TMCnet reported that according to Coyote Point, its load balancers, when deployed in front of the Microsoft OCS 2007, increase application uptime and maximize server farm utilization. The load balancer Equalizer receives all client requests, and distributes them efficiently to the “best” server among the available pool.

Saying Emergency Reporting is pleased with their new load balancers might be a bit of an understatement even.

“Switching to the Coyote Point Equalizers was one of the best decisions we’ve made,” said Stedman. “Equalizer provides all of the functionality of the Big-IP at a fraction of the cost. Our service has been available 24/7 with absolutely zero outages.”

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