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The Business Forum Journal

 

Several weeks back, in the September issue of The Business Forum Journal, I had published a white paper explaining the benefits of Server Virtualization and afterwards I received many emails asking me to justify the expenditure of implementing it.  So this month I have submitted the following paper.     ~     Jasper Rose

Return On Investment of Zeus Extensible Traffic Manager

 

Budget Restrictions

Do you want to make your budget go further?

Do you want to standardize your hardware purchases?

Do you need to delay hardware purchases?

“Having ZXTM protects us from costs related to significant traffic increases. We’re at capacity in our data center for both power and rack space. If we had to add more application servers to meet rising demand, we’d have to start looking at moving into a bigger space, potentially in a different data center, which could be very costly. Having ZXTM allows us to scale up to meet much more demand than we otherwise could, so we can delay that kind of expenditure.”

Christopher Pickslay, Director of Technology, GreatSchools

“We want an environment that scales with our growth. With F5, we had to buy new hardware each time to get more capacity. We had the Big IP1500, then the 3400, the 6400, and if we hadn't found Zeus, we would have had to buy the 6800. Every time we have to upgrade, it's another $100k, a new set of problems and two to three months for implementation. With ZXTM – and the fact that it’s pure software – we can scale by simply adding licenses as we need them. If I want to increase hardware performance, I can get what I need from Dell immediately, redeploy ZXTM, and I get the best of both worlds!”

Isaac Abecassis, CIO of Rapattoni

“We use the same hardware configuration for our web servers, so it’s very easy to replace any failed hardware.”

Hadi Partovi, President, iLike.com

“The hardware involved is just ordinary hardware – we have two clusters – one on an HP server and the other on a Sun server. No other specialist technologies were required to implement the solution. It just works.”

Philip Jensen, IT Section Manager, Sonofon

“We didn’t want to purchase stacks of hardware that would be quickly outdated. We wanted to invest in a solution that was capable enough and flexible enough to grow as our business and applications changed, and could be scaled cost effectively as our traffic grew.”

Justin Bartak, CTO, Ntractive

ZXTM is software so you can concentrate your buying power with your preferred hardware supplier and deploy ZXTM and your other applications across a common platform. Better hardware prices, less   vendor management and less maintenance downtime.

Opex cost savings

Do you want/need to save rack space, power costs, bandwidth costs or headcount costs?

“Beyond that, with ZXTM’s content compression, we have saved quite a lot of money in bandwidth costs. We’ve seen about a 30 – 40% reduction in bandwidth usage, which saves us thousands of dollars annually. We’ve also saved on purchasing new application servers and rack space due to caching of static content.”

Christopher Pickslay, Director of Technology, GreatSchools

“The solution allowed us to dramatically reduce the work our web servers were doing. The initial TCP/IP ‘handshake’ was moved to ZXTM, and a large number of images were cached, reducing both the requests to the web server and the CMS database. ZXTM compressed elements of the site allowing even dial-up users to make their way through our booking processes faster. ZXTM’s SSL encryption and load balancing features allowed us to have many fewer web servers in the farm. The bandwidth used by the Butlins website has been reduced by 25% due to ZXTM’s content compression functionality. Pages on all Bourne sites now load in half the time they used to require, which has had a similarly dramatic effect on the transactions being completed. Caching has permitted us to use a smaller back-end database server than we would have otherwise needed because we dramatically reduced the load on the SQL server by caching ColdFusion pages”

Jeremy Stancombe, IT Manager Bourne Leisure

“ZXTM’s 10x compression ratio saved us from having to pay for an OC3, and our customers with slow dial-up connections appreciate the increased speed we can now offer them.”

Isaac Abecassis, CIO of Rapattoni

“We spend about one third as much time managing ZXTM VA as we did F5. In other words, the work of 10 – 15 staff can be done by 3 – 5 people. This is largely due to how easy it is to use, and that TrafficScript™ makes it possible to write very sophisticated business rules into the way our virtual environment behaves. For us, this means we can leave the office at a more reasonable time, confident that the network is up and running efficiently.”

Marc Marien, Lead Engineer, Rodgers Townsend

“We didn’t want to purchase stacks of hardware that would be quickly outdated. We wanted to invest in a solution that was capable enough and flexible enough to grow as our business and applications changed, and could be scaled cost effectively as our traffic grew.”

Justin Bartak, CTO, Ntractive

We Energies has deployed ZXTM and has seen:

  • A 50% reduction in the complexity of their system

  • A hardware footprint less than a quarter of its previous size

  • The creation of a staging environment for testing proposed upgrades

  • Empowerment of the IT team to manage their complex Web Infrastructure

Because of the specification and functionality of ZXTM savings can be made in purchasing and managing other IT infrastructure. Because it can be deployed as a virtual appliance as well as a physical one you are investing the right technology today and for your plans for tomorrow.

Price versus functionality

Do you have to choose between a budget limit and the functionality you need?

Are you being forced to compromise on your IT strategy because of budget caps?

“The other options we explored were insufficient because we have numerous pools (200 – 300 websites). The F5 hardware compression solution does not compress enough – about 3x compression versus software compression. F5 and Zeus both offer software compression, but it is so slow on F5 that we would have had to buy three times as many F5 units to get the compression from a single ZXTM. For the same amount of compression, F5 was at 60% CPU utilization while ZXTM was at 4%, even on F5’s big 6800 series,”

Isaac Abecassis, CIO of Rapattoni

“Since implementing Zeus, our overall site traffic has increased by 400%, yet traffic to our backend nodes has only increased by 75%, while simultaneously reducing the burden on the applications by 80%.We can now do things with our applications that we wouldn’t have otherwise been able to do.”

Leigh Heyman, Lead System Administrator, Blue State Digital

“Now, over 95% of our F1 content is cached and served by ZXTM, drastically reducing the load on our website infrastructure and giving our users a consistently excellent online experience.”

Steve White, Head of Technology, ITV

“We also found that Zeus offered an excellent ‘performance-to-cost’ ratio, much better than the other vendors we considered,”

Ray Anderson, CEO, Bango

“Ease of monitoring is also a big step – now we can get graphs and see current connections, which is a big step forward compared to our old solution. Reliability of our infrastructure has improved and in fact, ZXTM is now used for monitoring and planning”.

Philip Jensen, IT Section Manager, Sonofon

“......just 24 hours after the deployment of ZXTM, we were able to remove a bottleneck we had previously found difficult to identify. As a result, we saw an immediate surge in capacity and an increase in uptime to 100%.”

Sagar Vadher, Head of IT, IWOOT

“We evaluated F5’s and Cisco’s products, even though neither could integrate with our virtual environment. There were problems with each of these and we didn’t even look at offerings by Barracuda and Coyote Point because they were simply not robust, We found that none of the competing products were anywhere near as flexible or as easy to use as ZXTM VA, which can be deployed virtually.”

Marc Marien, Lead Engineer, Rodgers Townsend

“We didn’t want to purchase stacks of hardware that would be quickly outdated. We wanted to invest in a solution that was capable enough and flexible enough to grow as our business and applications changed, and could be scaled cost effectively as our traffic grew. As an SaaS provider, we required as much flexibility as possible. Being able to add new features to ZXTM later on, such as Rate Shaping, Content Caching and Bandwidth Management on demand gives us the ability to quickly scale when needed. We really like having built-in languages like RuleBuilder™, TrafficScript™ and Java™ Extensions, which can give us the flexibility to manage traffic based on a set of our own business rules.”

Justin Bartak, CTO, Ntractive

ZXTM is feature rich, allowing you to make savings elsewhere within your IT budget and hit your SLAs. It gives you the tools to manage your IT infrastructure on a day to day basis and plan further investment. ZXTM offers a range of deployment options from appliances through to any virtual or Cloud environment, making it a ‘future-proof ’ purchase.  Headcount reductions and support Do you want to know that with your headcount restricted you are going to get the support you need when you need it?

“We first started working with F5 five years ago, when they were quick and responsive. Unfortunately, the level of service we received steadily dropped, and we were disappointed by the quality and reliability of their current products.”

Isaac Abecassis, CIO of Rapattoni

“I’ve used Zeus’ technical support quite a bit for both large and small projects and they’re always helpful. I’ve never had a question where they’ve merely responded, ‘Go read this white paper,’ rather than actually providing useful suggestions. The depth of knowledge they have seems as extensive as if they are the actual engineers who designed ZXTM. In terms of response times, communication style relevance and specificity, Zeus Technical Support has been absolutely top-grade.”

Leigh Heyman, Lead System Administrator, Blue State Digital

“The fact that ZXTM is so easy to use has meant that my team could learn the basics within minutes from ioko. We had excellent advice from Zeus’ and ioko’s Technical Support, who responded quickly with clever tips and tricks.”

Steve White, Head of Technology, ITV

“Within a day or two, we were able to purchase, deploy and configure ZXTM VA, and the best thing was that there were no surprises. It just worked, and when we had questions, Zeus Technology’s support was responsive and extremely helpful. Unlike F5, we don’t have to pay $250 per hour for any questions we may have.”

Marc Marien, Lead Engineer, Rodgers Townsend

“......just 24 hours after the deployment of ZXTM, we were able to remove a bottleneck we had previously found difficult to identify. As a result, we saw an immediate surge in capacity and an increase in uptime to 100%.”

Sagar Vadher, Head of IT, IWOOT.com

ZXTM will improve your applications reliability and availability and if you need support or advice then Zeus teams are there to offer first class assistance.  Virtualize the whole of your IT infrastructure.

Have you virtualized your IT infrastructure apart from your load balancers?

Do you want to prepare your IT infrastructure now to move into a virtual environment or the Cloud if you need/want to?

Why not have the benefits of virtualization across the whole of your IT infrastructure?

“The main reason we decided on a virtualized environment with ZXTM VA was that it gave us enterprise IT capabilities without paying enterprise prices to create a large server farm with hundreds of servers. We’re now able to test new developments before launching them.”

David Campbell, IT Architect, SmallCapInvestor

“Once ZXTM VA is put in front of the simulated traffic, I watch my customer’s jaw drop, as the difference is phenomenal. We had a customer with a very resource intensive Web 2.0 application that was lab and load tested to only handle 10 concurrent users. Using ZXTM VA, we were able to demonstrate that placing ZXTM in front of the application transformed the number of concurrent users from 10 into thousands – with no application modifications needed.”

Jeff Rhys-Jones, Founder, Yottaserve

“We evaluated F5’s and Cisco’s products, even though neither could integrate with our virtual environment. There were problems with each of these and we didn’t even look at offerings by Barracuda and Coyote Point because they were simply not robust.  We found that none of the competing products were anywhere near as flexible or as easy to use as ZXTM VA, which can be deployed virtually.”

Marc Marien, Lead Engineer, Rodgers Townsend

ZXTM VA can be deployed in any virtual environment. Traditional hardware load balancing solutions would sit outside a virtual environment acting as an anchor for your IT infrastructure. Invest now in the infrastructure that will perform today and prepare you for a move to the cloud when you are ready.

The Zeus web site contains a wealth of information on our products, services and solutions, as well as customer case studies and press information. For more information, please visit

http://www.zeus.com/knowledgehub.zeus.com

The ZXTM KnowledgeHub is a key resource for developers and system administrators wishing to learn about ZXTM and Zeus’ Traffic Management solutions. It is located at

http://knowledgehub.zeus.com/

Jasper M. Rose is Vice President Virtualization Business Unit for Zeus Technology, Inc. He has over 25 years of experience in the field of Information Technology.  During his career he has been a  Member of the Professional Telecommunications Workers of America and the Telecommunications Association and the American Society of Training Development. Jasper graduated from A. I. Prince Regional Technical School and is a Certified Network Telecommunications Engineer.  During his career he has held senior positions with Southern New England Telephone; Fujitsu America, Inc., and has been Director of Strategic Alliances and Business Development for Fujitsu Software Corporation; Director of Worldwide Accounts for Cylink Corporation; Director of Sales / Western Region for Solsoft Corporation and Regional Director Federal and Strategic Accounts for Array Networks, Inc., prior to joining Zeus Technology.

Visit the Authors Web Site

http://knowledgehub.zeus.com

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