Case study: Load balancing Roeville: online reservation systems

Transcription

1 Case study: Load balancing Roeville: online reservation systems 1ST EASY CASE STUDY SEPTEMBER 2009 James Burns, Marketing Manager, 1st Easy Limited What is this document about? For over 20 years, Roeville Reservation Software has been supplying computerised reservation systems for the coach and bus industry and has solutions for operators of all sizes and budgets. Roeville s software includes high performance coach tour/private hire reservation systems and professional e-commerce solutions. This document explores how 1st Easy were able to help Roeville meet their commitment to provide the best possible service to their customers, by advising on and implementing a network of load balanced servers to improve uptime and performance. 1st Easy Limited Your Internet Resource Partner sales@1steasy.com SaaS deployment Dedicated Servers Colocation Web hosting Remote Backups filtering

2 Software That Never Sleeps Roeville s Webres.net product uses Microsoft s cutting edge technology to deliver the ultimate internet reservation system for coach and tour operators. Using Commidea Card Handling Services and the power of.net, the system is capable of handling thousands of simultaneous page hits and bookings. Over the past six years the company has used this technology to provide tour operators with a web presence to help drive their businesses forward. Indeed, products from across the Roeville Reservation Software range have been adopted by a host of flagship operators in the UK as John Roe, Managing Director of Roeville explains: Introduction "We provide systems which are the culmination of years of experience in the software and tour business, and as a result, our software is the natural choice of many of the country's leading coach tour operators including National Holidays, Grand UK Holidays and TheCoachHoliday.com". 2

3 The challenge Richard Andrews, IT and Web Manager at Roeville outlines what the company wanted to achieve and why: "Roeville Reservation Software prides itself in providing a quality web e- Commerce solution at a fair and reasonable cost. To deliver this, it's crucial that our websites are hosted on a fast, high-uptime, high-value hosting platform. We have used several hosting companies in the past, and have always struggled to find a provider that has been able to deliver a reliable solution that's also tailored to our requirements. This has generally been a result of a host's unwillingness to customise a solution to specifically meet our needs, or simply their lack of expertise to implement our ideas. Roeville Reservation Software prides itself in providing a quality web e-commerce solution at a fair and reasonable cost. To deliver this, it's crucial that our websites are hosted on a fast, high-uptime, high-value hosting platform. Richard Andrews IT and Web Manager, Roeville The challenge "Our customer commitment at Roeville was to implement a more robust network of web servers that provided a load balanced solution with failover in the case of server down-time." 3

4 The solution "We already knew about load balancers and started looking at the market to quickly find that these devices were too expensive for us and beyond the budget of a small company like ours. We decided to speak to our existing host, 1st Easy, to see if they could help. Rather than the usual sales pitch that most companies would give us they actually listened to our needs and fully understood that we had a budget to work within. As it turns out, for a small investment in some of the equipment we already had, we could achieve our goal and for a lot less money than we d originally thought." Rather than the usual sales pitch that most companies would give us they actually listened to our needs and fully understood that we had a budget to work within. Richard Andrews IT and Web Manager, Roeville The solution Following a consultation to establish the goals of the potential project, 1st Easy designed and deployed a load balancing architecture that addressed the key points of Roeville's objective to improve service to their customers. Stephen Bell, Managing Director at 1st Easy explains: "The solution optimises the performance of Roeville's web applications by intelligently distributing traffic across a cluster of their servers. We were also able to improve the resilience of the service by designing the system to detect and manage hardware failure. So, if one of the servers in the cluster develops a fault, traffic is automatically redirected to the remaining healthy servers. As a result, users of Roeville's online services are not aware of any downtime." 4

5 Freeing up time that would otherwise be wasted chasing and resolving technical issues is an additional benefit of the new arrangement, as summarised by John: "The fact that the 1st Easy hosting solution has provided us with an excellent service throughout makes it easier for us to concentrate on our product and business development. Roeville has a strong relationship with 1st Easy and we know we can rely on their fair and vast knowledge within the hosting market." Finding out more Finding out more If you would like to explore the benefits of a load balanced solution for your business, please contact Stephen Bell on for a free consultation and assessment of your business and technology strategies. Roeville Reservation Software To find out more about Roeville, please contact Richard Andrews, IT/Web Manager on Further information is also available at: 5