Coyote Point Balances Student Load at TheClassConnection.com

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

Availability™, announced that

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

http://www.coyotepoint.com.

Contacts: Kat Marquez Director of Marketing +1.408.291.5246 http://www.coyotepoint.com Zee Zaballos ZNA Communications +831.425.1581×201 http://www.zna.com