UltraServe scales more efficiently and at lower cost with Riverbed Stingray Traffic Manager

Hosting and managed service provider UltraServe has implemented load balancing software to improve resource utilisation and throughput, while minimising response time and avoiding overload.

Specialising in cloud and managed hosting infrastructure for many high-traffic e-retailer and media sites in Australia, the company required a load balancing solution that would allow transparent growth capability, enabling businesses to scale efficiently and cost-effectively.

“The situation was no longer sustainable and we became quite frustrated with the old and traditional load-balancing technology available. Not only was it old hardware, but also very expensive to maintain,” said UltraServe founder and CEO Samuel Yeats.

In 2011, UltraServe investigated the available load balancing options on the market and, after reviewing a number of vendors, decided on Riverbed Stingray Traffic Manager software.

Stingray Traffic Manager is a virtual application delivery controller (ADC) that provides flexibility and a single point of management for accelerating applications hosted on servers. It also equips network operators and developers with Riverbed Stingray TrafficScript software to create traffic management rules using global load balancing, bandwidth management, rate shaping and service level monitoring.

UltraServe integrated Stingray Traffic Manager into its cloud infrastructure and developed an autoscale functionality that allows its clients to automatically provision servers in response to load.

Since the implementation, UltraServe has noticed significant improvements to productivity and performance.

“Stingray has allowed us and our customers to scale more efficiently, at a much lower cost. A significant cost saving was experienced, which we are able to pass onto our customers,” said Yeats.

“Our customers are finding that they can achieve cost savings of 30 to 40% using the Stingray autoscale functionality to scale infrastructure in response to demand,” said Yeats.

Customers are now also able to do anytime, anywhere upgrades and updates with a single download and licence key.

“A key promise of cloud computing is the ability to innovate at reduced risk and cost. The flexibility of being able to scale up and down licensing allows the product to be used for short-term campaigns, market testing and innovation without the barrier of a significant capex investment,” said Yeats.

UltraServe and its customers have found that moving from physical load balancing appliances, with limited internal scalability, to a virtualised Stingray environment has created a very agile platform.

“In using the platform, our customers have been able to grow seamlessly up to 300%. Many start with a basic Stingray solution, then add features and scale out to a clustered active load-balancing environment, as required,” said Yates.