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Finding a product that allowed highly flexible load balancing & availability in a high volume-messaging environment. We needed to be able to scale to meet ever increasing messaging needs and provide redundant messaging and queuing connections to the top tier wireless carriers such as AT&T, T-Mobile, Alltel & Verizon, as well as employ standard HTTP load balancing for our web/wap front end. Within our messaging core we also needed a solution that could handle a high number of transactions and remain very scaleable. Deploying hardware-based load balancers would not have been a cost effective solution on a per-carrier basis.
The expansion of our messaging capabilities relied heavily on being able to cluster and distribute carrier-facing servers with ease. Current hardware based solutions would not be able to determine system & network loads in a manner intelligent enough to manner - something that resided on the servers themselves would have to be found. Although we had great success with the Cisco Local Director product, it would never meet our requirements as our business rapidly grew.
In 2002 we deployed Central Dispatch into our production environment and immediately saw the results. Since we were now able to balance directly on the hosts that were running specific applications, clustering and spreading the load across multiple servers gave us the ability to re-route traffic and services in real-time, without so much as a blip in production traffic & transactions. The ability to distribute high volume messaging loads across multiple machines, and very simply increase the size of the cluster allowed us so scale without worrying about architecture. The highly available nature of CD is very reassuring, and the overall maintenance / upkeep of the product is very minimal. Basically, there is no babysitting involved! In an environment processing tens of millions of transactions a day the last thing my team or I want to worry about is the stability of our load balancing. CD definitely gives us peace of mind.
The learning curve involved with installation, configuration and usage is minimal — but the power that you are given is immense. On the fly selection of hosts within a load balancing group, selection of multiple fail over hosts, the ability to enforce site-wide or group wide load balancing policies make CD a key part of our messaging infrastructure. I can honestly say it is one of the best pieces of software we have purchased - And I am always eager to talk up the product and it's merits to clients, vendors and industry peers alike. Bottom line, we are able to meet the messaging demands of every major wireless carrier as a result of CD deployment.
Michael A. O'Dea
Director of Operations Upoc Networks
www.upocnetworks.com