Coyote Point Balances Student Load at TheClassConnection.com
2008-07-15 08:00:00
Coyote Point Balances Student Load at TheClassConnection.com
Coyote Point’s Equalizer Series Replaces Problem-Plagued Barracuda Networks Low-End Load Balancer
SAN JOSE, CA–(EMWNews – July 15, 2008) – Coyote
Point Systems, Inc., the leader in non-stop, affordable Application
theClassConnection.com, a free educational tool available to students
and teachers at both high schools and colleges around the world, has
deployed its Equalizer Series advanced application load balancing system to
provide non-stop, student-critical access to its online academic
ecosystems.
Uptime is important when your customer base has grown 900-fold in 10 months
and usage can peak at 5,000 hits per hour. When this situation faced
theClassConnection.com, they turned to Coyote Point. Launched in September
2007 at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, theClassConnection.com
serves both students and professors with numerous online academic and
communication tools that help students study more efficiently. Users can
create educational content, organize existing school materials, and
communicate about academic issues using one easy-to-use online interface.
These features comprise a virtual ecosystem for each class because one user
can impact the entire class by creating a community calendar event,
publicly sharing files, or posting a comment on the course forum. Growth
of the online community has been rapid — from one university in September
to 638 universities and 260 high schools. These students and teachers
require a website that is up and running 100 percent of the time.
“Uptime is important for a number of reasons,” said Dave Sargent, Vice
President of Business Development for theClassConnection.com. “The
students depend on us, especially before an exam. We typically get 4,000 to
5,000 hits an hour before an exam. For example, the students come to the
site and use 100 to 200 flashcards to help them study. If the site goes
down, we get a lot of emails from students panicked because they need their
flashcards to study for finals. They write ‘I’ve put a lot of time into
this, and you guys are down.’ This is a major problem, not a perceived
problem. We have real customers writing us when the site goes down, so we
can’t go down.”
When theClassConnection.com launched, they were using two load balancers
from Barracuda Networks. “The Barracuda boxes were basically bottom of the
barrel in terms of what they offer — the cheapest that we could find
because we were trying to cut costs in our growth stage. But we had so many
problems with them, it was unbelievable,” said Sargent. “We had almost
every piece of hardware fail in both of the load balancers and a number of
software failures as well. We literally had hours and hours of downtime
because of those load balancers.
“Then we heard about Coyote Point from CDW, and we knew that they were a
notch up from the competitor. Since we’ve moved to Coyote Point, we’ve had
99.9% uptime, because the E350si traffic manager is a much more reliable
front-end for our Sun servers.”
Not only has the new Coyote Point load balancer helped with uptime for
student usage, but its reliability has also affected the professors who use
theClassConnection.com.
According to Sargent, “A professor at the University of Oklahoma placed his
course content on the site and requested his students to access it on the
site. The site was down to a problem with our former load balancer, and the
students couldn’t access their projects. Not only did it make the
professor look silly, it made us look unreliable. Now, with Coyote Point,
we don’t have that problem. In fact, now we receive positive emails from
students instead of negative ones. Since there is no downtime, our users
can access their information, and there are no more complaints. We’re all
happy with how it has worked out. We’re even looking at expanding our
business and acquiring another Coyote Point load balancer to help us manage
that growth.”
About TheClassConnection.com
TheClassConnection.com serves both students and professors with numerous
online academic and communication tools that help students study more
efficiently. Users can create educational content, organize existing school
materials, and communicate about academic issues using one easy-to-use
online interface. These features comprise a virtual ecosystem for each
class because one user can impact the entire class by creating a community
calendar event, publicly sharing files, or posting a comment on the course
forum.
About Coyote Point
Coyote Point Systems, Inc. has emerged as the leader in Non-Stop,
Affordable Application Availability for the small and midrange enterprise.
Coyote Point’s award-winning Equalizer Series load balancing and
acceleration systems provide the industry’s foremost combination of
performance, affordability and ease of use. Thousands of customers
worldwide deploy Coyote Point solutions to ensure non-stop operations,
accelerated delivery and on-demand scalability of business-critical
Websites and applications. Coyote Point is headquartered in San Jose, CA
and works with leading channel partners in the U.S., Canada, Europe, Asia,
Australia and Africa. The company can be reached at 1-877-367-2696 or
Contacts: Kat Marquez Director of Marketing +1.408.291.5246 Zee Zaballos +831.425.1581×201 |
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