Case Studies: ShareCompany

New Generation Load Balancing for Managed Financial and Media Solutions

ShareCompany (www.sharecompany.nl), based in the Netherlands, is a leading provider of managed solutions for banks, brokers and media. Servicing large companies such as ABN, AMRO, Rabobank, RTL, SNS Bank and more, ShareCompany's products include websites, streaming market data terminals and web services for various applications. ShareCompany has over one million online users a day viewing content from its managed solutions.

Due to increased demand by high-profile customers, ShareCompany needed to set up a second data center. They hired consulting firm and reseller partner Quanza Engineering to design the new network with requirements for high availability, performance and reliability. ShareCompany previously deployed F5 Networks' Big-IP load balancers in its old network. However, to meet the increased requirements for the second data center, Quanza recommended A10's AX Series new generation server load balancers for the company's application delivery needs.

ShareCompany's new data center infrastructure includes servers running on Windows 2003 and 2008 platforms, with applications that handle, process and distribute financial market information with rates of up to 400,000 records per second, including XML feeds and many other sources. The information is stored in SQL and memory databases, and it is streamed via web servers hosting its customers' websites.

AX Series: All Features Included without Licensing Fees

ShareCompany selected four of A10's AX 1000s over the incumbent BIG-IP appliances and other competing solutions for the following compelling reasons:

• Redundancy: The AX Series ensures system failover works without disturbing ShareCompany's production sites, enabling the ability to manage and monitor its dual data centers, comprised of the old and new sites.
  
  
• High Availability (HA): The AX Series provides maximum uptime for applications. The AX Series HA sub-second failover and session synch between two units ensures a seamless user experience, and peace of mind for the IT team.
  
  
• Price/performance: After evaluation, AX Series proved to deliver superior performance at a much lower price point than the incumbent solution, ensuring headroom for growth, while no additional feature or performance licenses ensure future fiscal responsibility. The AX Series provides the industry's only Scalable Symmetrical Multiprocessing (SSMP), state-of-the-art, new-generation architecture that consistently outperforms the competition, ultimately providing a faster and better experience to the end user.

ShareCompany leverages cookie-based persistence to keep all HTTP sessions from individual clients tied to one server, so an HTTP "control connection" can spawn multiple HTTP "streaming connections" and all connections end up at the same correct server. ShareCompany also leverages source NAT for Internet access of hosts behind the load balancer, and OSPF for announcing VIPs (virtual IPs) and networks behind the load balancer. Finally, AX's host-switching feature redirects URLs with a certain prefix (for example, acc. instead of www.) to special acceptance servers.

ShareCompany's Data Center Deployment

"A10 Networks provides market leading innovation to the Application Delivery market with its new generation, highly scalable AX Series appliances," said Mr. Frans ter Borg, CEO, Quanza Engineering. "The AX Series is the perfect fit for customers such as ShareCompany that have new data center projects with increased needs for performance and availability. We are proud to recommend our partner A10 Networks for this project, and pleased to see the positive results."

Success: Application Delivery Makes Business Sense for Managed Solutions

Upon deploying the AX Series, ShareCompany's products, including websites, streaming market data terminals and web services, are faster and performing more responsively to the users, without breaking the bank. Its new second data center is scalable and highly available, allowing ShareCompany to add more users and clients while continuing to provide excellent levels of service. With AX Series for Application Delivery, ShareCompany helps its customers succeed by quickly delivering information, anytime and anywhere.

About AX Series

A10 Networks' AX Series is the industry's best price/performance advanced traffic manager - helping enterprises and ISPs maximize application availability through a high-performance and scalable Web Application Delivery platform. The AX's Advanced Core Operating System (ACOS) architecture has garnered the company numerous awards and is revolutionary by market standards due to its Scalable Symmetrical Multiprocessing (SSMP), shared memory architecture. AX includes an optimized multi-CPU architecture built from the ground up that leaps the competition in terms of performance, scalability and reliability. For more information, visit: www.a10networks.com/products/axseries

About A10 Networks

A10 Networks was founded in 2004 with a mission to provide innovative networking and security solutions. A10 Networks makes high-performance products that help organizations accelerate, optimize and secure their applications. A10 Networks is headquartered in Silicon Valley with offices in the United States, United Kingdom, France, The Netherlands, Germany, Brazil, Japan, China, Korea and Taiwan. For more information, visit: www.a10networks.com

About Quanza Engineering

Quanza Engineering builds ICT Infrastructure in Professional Datacenters. Quanza Engineering specializes in high-performance and high availability environments, and the firm partners with innovative hardware and solutions providers, like A10 Networks. Quanza Engineering is based in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. For more information, visit: www.quanza.net