Case study: Load balancing

Richard Andrews, IT and Web Manager at Roeville outlines what the company wanted to achieve:

"Roeville Reservation Software prides itself in providing a quality web e-Commerce solution at a fair and reasonable cost. To deliver this, it's crucial that our websites are hosted on a fast, high-uptime, high-value hosting platform. We have used several hosting companies in the past, and have always struggled to find a provider that has been able to deliver a reliable solution that's also tailored to our requirements. This has generally been a result of a host's unwillingness to customise a solution to specifically meet our needs, or simply their lack of expertise to implement our ideas."

As a means towards meeting this customer commitment, the company had already identified a requirement to improve the resilience of their web server network by implememting a load balanced solution with failover in the case of server down-time. However, previous investigations into the deployment of load balancing solutions had stumbled against the issue of the prohibitively high costs typically associated with such server architectures.

Following a consultation to establish the goals of the potential project, 1st Easy designed and deployed a load balancing architecture that addressed the key points of Roeville's objective to improve service to their customers. Stephen Bell, Managing Director at 1st Easy explains:

"The solution optimises the performance of Roeville's web applications by intelligently distributing traffic across a cluster of their servers. We were also able to improve the resilience of the service by designing the system to detect and manage hardware failure. So, if one of the servers in the cluster develops a fault, traffic is automatically redirected to the remaining healthy servers. As a result, users of Roeville's online services are not aware of any downtime."

Stephen Bell
Director, 1st Easy Limited

Richard concludes:

"Rather than the usual sales pitch that most companies would give us they actually listened to our needs and fully understood that we had a budget to work within. As it turns out, for a small investment in some of the equipment we already had, we could achieve our goal and for a lot less money than we'd originally thought."