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During the flu season, pharmacies, hospitals, and doctors’ offices increase activity on the MyFluVaccine™ portal, creating peak usage conditions. To prepare for the flu season peak, FFF Enterprises began evaluating Juniper’s DX line of server load balancers to ensure MyFluVaccine’s™ performance and availability to customers. However, shortly after the initial evaluation, Juniper announced it would end of life its DX family with a smooth transition for customers. FFF Enterprises concurrently read about A10 Networks® Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) in the news, highlighting recent independent third-party performance from the Tolly Group, which proved that A10 ADC delivers over double the performance at less than half the price of incumbents. As a result, FFF Enterprises chose to evaluate the A10 ADC, a next-generation server load balancer platform that has garnered numerous awards for its multi-core CPU architecture that is tuned for high volume web applications such as MyFluVaccine™.

Excite Japan Co., Ltd. provides various portal services, such as “Excite” and “Beauty Navi” that have been steadily attracting more users – and an application download service for smartphones with a large number of downloads recorded. The portal service operates as its core business, so Excite must offer a comfortable interface to users, and operate a stable network infrastructure to support it. Excite addresses several business issues in order to run a stable infrastructure. “DDoS attacks targeting the websites of public offices and organizations, such as SYN flood attacks, have been increasing year by year, so Excite Japan also looks at ways to further reinforce security while maintaining the current performance.” “As our service expands, unexpected traffic loads may occur, and an increase in traffic is anticipated in the near future. In order to manage this, we sought to reinforce the system by installing a more spacious load balancer in terms of performance.” Simultaneously, Excite Japan considered reinforcing IPv6 support in order to handle a surge in IPv6 clients following the announcement that IPv4 addresses were exhausted in 2011.

NTT Plala Inc. launched its video distribution service Hikari-TV in 2008. Since then, subscriber numbers have risen steadily and currently stand at 3.05 million. The UI screen of a Hikari-TV-compatible tuner (set-top box) is distributed from a server that configures metadata, BML and UJML content, and uses an advanced server load balancer. A feature of Hikari-TV is that it has, from the start, provided IPv6-based services using NTT East and West’s FLET’S and Next Generation Network (NGN). NTT Plala’s Tomonobu Akimoto explains how choosing a load balancer was difficult because, in 2008, IPv6 technology was just beginning to spread and commercial use was in its early days. Even if the catalog said a product was IPv6-compatible, that didn’t necessarily mean all of its functions could be used just as with IPv4. We looked for the best solution available. At the time, many products that claimed to be IPv6-compatible provided compatibility only for basic functions. But NTT Plala needed a product that would support the functions we needed from a load balancer, such as SSL acceleration and source IP and cookie persistence, which are also necessary in an IPv6 environment. Besides IPv6 compatibility, it would have to be able to handle the huge volume of traffic that would come as subscriber numbers rose, and provide both high performance as well as stability. At the time, most IPv6-compatible products were high-end models that processed traffic using their CPU, but, as Mr. Akimoto explains, NTT Plala had concerns regarding the stability afforded by this approach: If you process everything using the CPU, the high load resulting from bugs in just a few functions can affect all traffic. So we looked for a model using ASICs, with the hope that hardware-based processing would provide performance and stability.

Casio Computer Company, Limited faced significant challenges with their internal communications infrastructure due to an increased load on proxy servers following the introduction of Google Apps for Work. The existing load balancer could only perform pings via live monitoring, preventing proper allocation of processing resources. Additionally, the use of open source software for the proxy meant inefficient response in the event of failures. The company had to suspend email systems for several hours each day during planned power outages following the Great East Japan Earthquake in March 2011. This led to considerable disruptions in work, prompting the company to introduce Google Apps for Work as a communication infrastructure able to withstand disasters. However, as the number of users increased, the load on the proxies became greater, affecting application performance and user experience.

To meet their customers’ needs, LeaseWeb demanded a stable and high performance advanced Server Load Balancing (SLB) solution that included a comprehensive range of innovative features, with no licensing fees. LeaseWeb’s supplier, Datapulse, was extremely satisfied with A10 and highly recommended A10’s SLB solutions. After considering a few industry competitors, LeaseWeb conducted internal test procedures with A10 Networks’ Application Delivery Controllers (ADCs), which proved themselves by performing above LeaseWeb’s requirements. “Our internal test procedures proved A10 products performed up to and above our requirements,” said Bastiaan Spandaw, Lead Architect. In addition, LeaseWeb was very pleased with the support and customer focus they received from A10’s dedicated team.

For the past five years, Gamania has leveraged application delivery controllers (ADCs) to enhance its online Web gaming application services. This includes load balancing and application acceleration for value-added services, such as downloading patch files and access to online games. In 2008, Gamania expanded its operations to deliver increased services to its users, which required more ADCs to be added to its continuously growing network. For its data center and operation expansion project, Gamania had several options for the new ADCs. The first was to purchase additional BIG-IP load balancers from F5, its incumbent provider. The second was to evaluate alternatives to see if there are better solutions in the industry. For this option, Gamania evaluated Citrix’s NetScaler and A10 Networks® Application Delivery Controllers. During the proof of concept (PoC) period, A10 Networks’ new-generation ADCs demonstrated superb performance, flexibility and scalability, which outshined competitors. As a result, Gamania selected A10 ADC for its expansion project.

McMaster University needed to replace its outdated WebCT 4.1 Learning Management System (LMS) with a more advanced and comprehensive system. The new system had to support e-Learning, course and student management, and include Web 2.0 collaborative features. Additionally, the university required an upgrade of the underlying system architecture, including both physical and virtual servers, to ensure high availability and to power the new features. An Application Delivery Controller was also needed to provide application acceleration, load balancing, and Layer 7 scripting with rewrite functionality. After researching various options, McMaster narrowed the choice to Citrix NetScaler, F5 Networks BIG-IP, Cisco ACE, and A10 Networks Application Delivery Controllers (ADC).

Dainik Bhaskar Group required a solution that could manage its network traffic during spikes. The newspaper organization was previously using a Fortinet firewall with a basic load balancer that provided limited features and scalability. Dainik Bhaskar maintained several news delivery network platforms, and these platforms faced frequent traffic spikes. Application usage surged whenever any major events occurred. Whenever significant news announcements were made, network traffic would typically spike between 30% to 70%. With 15 websites across the region and nationwide, the critical challenge was to improve Dainik Bhaskar’s website performance during peak traffic when many users were trying to access a single website at the same time.

To meet the requirements for simultaneous information sharing within the organization, SK Life deployed six Web application servers for its internal applications and storage. Initially, the applications ran at 5 Mbps, but after the integrated investment insurance policies took place, the need increased to 30 Mbps. Increased internal application traffic caused network latency whereby employees had to wait to get online and collect client and program information, and as a result business opportunities were lost. Upon research, SK Life learned that network congestion could be resolved with an advanced Application Delivery Controller (ADC), and contacted A10 Networks to evaluate its award-winning ADCs. Upon deploying the A10 ADC, SK Life immediately realized the benefits and made the purchase.

Due to its approach of adopting the latest technologies, Servers Australia manages several different solutions concurrently to cater to various customer requirements. Over the years, the company installed a number of products, including Citrix and F5, for load balancing, high availability and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) protection. Managing the different systems became a challenge, and made it more difficult to resolve customer issues promptly. This, in turn, was impacting Servers Australia’s commitment to provide the best customer service in the industry. Servers Australia took corrective action by looking for a single solution that could meet all their customers’ needs and cover the wide variety of requirements.

Mitsui Knowledge Industry (MKI) faced the challenge of launching a verification service for various network environments to support Japanese companies expanding overseas. The company needed to comply with the latest standards while maintaining high stability and support for 10GbE networks and IPv6. Additionally, MKI aimed to address issues such as acquiring reliable information on local IT and networks and retaining competent IT engineers locally. The goal was to leverage technological expertise and engineering resources to resolve these issues and support the verification of IT infrastructure for customers at the initial stage.

Taobao, the largest Internet retail and trading website in China, faced significant challenges in handling the rapidly increasing load on its data center and CDN sites. The old systems in their data centers could not provide the required high performance at Layer 7, leading to instability and inefficiency. With nearly 100 million registered users and growing, the data center traffic was taxing on the network and application servers. Taobao needed a solution that could handle the increasing load on Layer 4 services in the data center and provide better Layer 7 performance to accommodate the demands on the CDN and its nodes. The primary challenge was to ensure that the site remained available for users while managing traffic surges and volume growth effectively.

Micron21 faced the challenge of expanding its infrastructure to meet increasing demand while ensuring high performance and security. The company needed to replace its software-based load-balancing technology with a more effective hardware solution. The urgency was heightened by the opportunity to host the 2014 White Night festival, which required managing over 1 million simultaneous visitors. Micron21 needed reliable, high-performance devices with features like RAM caching, compression, SSL acceleration, and DDoS protection to successfully execute the festival’s hosting and retain future clients.

Buienradar’s network was split across a primary and secondary data center, each with a cluster of web servers connected using carrier-grade routers and switches. The network traffic, mainly HTTP, was spread across the servers using load balancers. However, the relatively low performance numbers of the company’s legacy load balancers meant they had to be deployed in Direct Server Return (DSR) mode, causing server responses to bypass the load balancer and disabling many advanced features. When the legacy load balancers reached end of life, Buienradar sought a more robust replacement. Additionally, Buienradar needed a new generation server load balancer capable of providing Global Server Load Balancing (GSLB) to handle their distributed network with geographically separate data centers. Another criterion was the impending depletion of IPv4 addresses, necessitating readiness for IPv6 clients.

Indianapolis Public Schools saw that the learning and teaching styles of their students and staff were transitioning from desktop machines to laptops. The IT department knew they needed a plan to protect these portable devices.

With a team of researchers holding Masters and PhDs, CASAColumbia employees are often out among the public doing surveys and gathering information, frequently in environments where people are living lives that have been impacted by addiction and substance abuse. CASAColumbia needed to be HIPAA compliant with their research data and also wanted to protect the investment in their laptops. Part of being HIPAA compliant means that CASAColumbia must prove that patient data on laptops hasn’t been compromised, and that data is properly removed from a device and destroyed when the computer is decommissioned.

While the CWA student laptop program is viewed a success by everyone involved, the Information Services Department at William Penn saw two significant challenges to the program: lost or stolen laptop computers, and students dropping out and not returning their laptops to the University. “We had a real problem with laptops not being returned to the College after students withdrew from their programs without graduating” says Dan Morgan, Director of Information Services and Curtis Gomes, Information Technology Supervisor at CWA.

In 2010, St. Joseph transitioned to an electronic medical records (EMR) provider, so that patient care professionals could bring tablets with them during their home visits. Because these tablets would be carrying sensitive patient data, St. Joseph needed to implement a technology that could monitor the devices off the local network and maintain visibility to ensure the integrity of the stored data.

Over a period of a year, the college suffered from a number of thefts and 56 devices were stolen. These thefts were frustrating for the college as not only was it was proving expensive to replace the laptops each time they were stolen but it could take up to 20 working days for a replacement to be delivered. This had a real impact on the teaching staff as they struggled to prepare for lessons without a laptop. Syddansk Erhvervsskole decided to look for a solution that would enable it to quickly recover its laptops in the event of theft.

In order to enable the mobile device users, SNCF had to ensure that the devices and the sensitive data they contained were protected. Device loss or theft could result in commercially sensitive data being released to the public. It was therefore necessary for the IT department of the Technicentre to find a solution that could protect their mobile devices and the data they contain whilst being able to withstand hard drive reformatting and operating system reinstallations.

With a corporate history that has seen the firm build market share through the acquisition of other accounting offices, Grant Thornton’s IT team was challenged to design and continually refine a single, standardized IT model that sought efficiency in a high degree of standardization. To add to the challenge, the mobile nature of Grant Thornton’s employees and preference for leasing its devices meant that the IT team needed to track and provide data security for more than 8,000 devices regardless of their physical location – whether in the office or with a travelling employee.

Given the high stakes, losing a laptop was not really an option. “In this case, we knew that regardless of how prevalent laptop theft might be, we also knew we couldn’t afford to lose any machines,” Bauer reflected. Bauer understands how technology can be used to solve larger business challenges. By stepping back and looking at the whole picture, Bauer recognized that there had to be a way to draw together the seemingly disparate elements of how an organization functions and how technology can be used to solve the specific problems of loss prevention, data protection and regulatory compliance: “If you implement solutions that address the root of a problem, then quite often subtle technological modifications can invoke sweeping organizational change.”

BCPSS understood the value of introducing technology in the classroom – it plays an important role in meeting the needs of the broad range of abilities, disabilities, cultural backgrounds, and ethnic populations. However, with especially high crime rates in the city of Baltimore, the IT team was set the difficult challenge of ensuring that all school devices were secured and accounted for. How would IT support 200 schools, 8,000 teachers and 85,000 students? With so many laptops distributed, the risk of theft was inevitable. How could BCPSS prevent theft and protect their teachers and students as they carried their devices through a city that struggled with crime? It was clear that the department would need a solid security strategy to reduce the risk of theft and protect their school environment.

While aware that physical deterrents such as cable locks aren’t sufficient to stop the most determined criminal, the school needed another security measure in case one of its 200 laptops went missing. “The school’s laptop computers are a vital piece of teaching and learning equipment for both our students and staff,” said Kjetil Simeon Olsen, IT advisor at the Norwegian School of Veterinary Science. “If any of them go missing, it can be hugely disruptive for both students and teaching staff. We want to ensure that in the event one of the mobile devices goes missing, we would be able to get it back.”

Faced with 650 laptops in circulation in 2014 among pre-teens, and another 650 planned for high school students in 2015, the IT department at SKUSD needed a way to prevent the theft of laptops. Not only did a stolen laptop represent a lost investment, it also meant a student’s progress would be hampered.

Several staff laptops had been stolen in the past, so Cornwall College’s IT team knew they needed tighter security measures. Previously, etching techniques were used to write contact details on laptops, which would show up in UV lights if missing laptops were recovered by the police. However, this process was time consuming and ineffective. Crucially, it also failed to proactively search for missing hardware.

Don Williams, AW’s Technology Coordinator, describes laptop theft as costly and inconvenient; it overstretches available resources and interrupts the workflow of both staff and students. As school boards often face a rigid budget, maximizing IT investments is essential. Each time a lost or stolen asset has to be replaced, the budget is challenged. Williams explains that current economic conditions have intensified the need to get the most out of IT assets, requiring AW to be particularly “proactive and reactive” in minimizing loss and maximizing the lifespan of their computer population.

CHU de Clermont-Ferrand was losing an average of two devices each month to theft. Sensitive patient data was secured as it was hosted in the hospital’s data centre but device theft created a considerable disruption to the end user’s work, not to mention the extra IT resources required to replace and configure a new device each time. Hervé Grandjean, Head of Administrative Information and Services for CHU de Clermont-Ferrand, needed to find a practical and cost-effective to secure his endpoints.

The mix of laptops to desktops at CareSource was 30:70, with approximately 300 laptops in a growing inventory. The CareSource IT team knew they needed to track all their machines — especially the more portable laptops — because they contained protected health information (PHI). The CareSource IT team also wanted to work toward best practices in protecting PHI and compliance with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).

Sacred Heart Hospital has dramatically increased the number of laptops they provide to nurses, physicians, and other staff to enable more effective patient care. However, with the move towards portable devices, Sacred Heart needed to effectively monitor the devices and have a solution in place where the hardware, as well as the sensitive data stored on these devices, were protected regardless of the device location or the user.