In April 2013, Newport City Homes replaced its poorly-performing Windows Server NLB with an advanced load-balancing appliance from JetNexus. The original system had resulted in the housing provider’s home page taking up to 20 seconds to load.
Having previously used an external hosting company, NCH decided to bring its web services in-house due to an expansion in its business operations and increasing interfacing requirements, and began a project to create a Microsoft Sharepoint-based website.
Following Microsoft’s recommendations for SharePoint deployment, NCH needed a load-balancing system and used Windows Server NLB on their front-end web servers. However once the infrastructure element of the project was completed and testing started, it became apparent that Windows Server NLB was not suitable in this instance.
Owen Barrett, IS manager, Newport City Homes, said, “It was taking roughly 20 seconds to download the homepage of our website using Windows Server NLB, which wasn’t acceptable to us or our end-users.
“Based on past experiences, I expected that a load balancing system with the functionality that we needed would be too expensive. However, JetNexus’s Accelerating Load Balancer Extreme (ALB-X) appliance represented excellent value for money, while fitting in with our current platform and virtual environment.”
NCH has now installed two JetNexus ALB-X virtual appliances on-site to manage their corporate SharePoint website platform. The housing provider now plans to deploy more JetNexus appliances in the near future for its Microsoft Lync2010 and Exchange 2010 services.
Barrett said, “Once we’d evaluated the appliance, we never looked back. The ALB-X exceeded our initial expectations and deployment was very easy; we were up and running in less than an hour.
“We saw an immediate improvement when we deployed the ALB-X appliances, including a massive 18 second reduction in load times, which in turn enables us to provide a faster and more user-friendly online experience for our tenants.”
