Online Retailers

Online retailers' primary goals are to attract and retain profitable customers, to avoid customer churn, and to ensure their infrastructure can process all the transactions it receives without failure. Every second of downtime means lost revenue, and will generally cause impatient customers to take their business to an alternative supplier. Service responsiveness and availability are therefore high priorities.

Play.com

“PLAY.COM records dramatic improvements in online application speed with ZXTM”

As well as enabling us to provide our customers a better service with faster and more reliable delivery of our web content, ZXTM gives us the ability to plan for future growth by enabling us to simply scale up our infrastructure and introduce faster hardware as needed.

David Turner, Systems Architect, PLAY.COM
Case Study

Case study: PLAY.COM

PLAY.COM is one of the largest online retailers in the UK and North America, specializing in DVDs, CDs and games. By trading solely through their e-commerce site, they can offer significant discounts over the more traditional highstreet retailers, and this results in very high volumes of traffic and transactions through their application server clusters.

The challenge

Due to the growth in business and, as a consequence, the traffic to their site, they were looking for a solution to replace their existing Micorosoft Windows network load balancing solution, as it was not providing the scalability they needed. Due to the mission-critical nature of their e-commerce servers, the company is also looking to bring online a separate datacentre for the purposes of disaster recovery and bandwidth sharing.

The solution

The company deployed first deployed ZXTM LB, then subsequently ZXTM to manage their e-commerce clusters. Products from F5 and Cisco were evaluated, but they did not offer the flexibility, scalability and cost-effectiveness that ZXTM offered.

The payback

Since deploying ZXTM, the company has seen:

a reduction in overall administration time
ZXTM coping with "everything we've thrown at it so far"
no downtime whatsoever due to ZXTM
a significant improvement in overall performance
no security issues
improved usage of their existing server caches

Key solution features

Cache optimization - ZXTM's load balancing algorthms automatically make best use of caching application servers
TrafficCluster™ scalability - Ensures that the public-facing services managed by ZXTM are always available and have enough capacity, and can be scaled up without the constraint of deploying in pairs