Case Studies > Advanced Application Delivery Solution for Growing Online Retailer

Advanced Application Delivery Solution for Growing Online Retailer

Customer Company Size

Mid-size Company

Region

Europe

Country

Netherlands

Product

A10 ADC
ACOS

Tech Stack

SSL Offload
HTTP RAM Caching
Advanced Core Operating System (ACOS)

Implementation Scale

Enterprise-wide Deployment

Impact Metrics

Customer Satisfaction
Productivity Improvements
Cost Savings

Technology Category

Analytics & Modeling - Predictive Analytics
Functional Applications - Remote Monitoring & Control Systems
Networks & Connectivity - Network Management & Analysis Software

Applicable Industries

Retail

Applicable Functions

Business Operation
Sales & Marketing

Services

System Integration
Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services

About The Customer

Based in the Netherlands, 123inkt.nl started its e-commerce company back in 2000 selling a range of inkjet and toner cartridges. Over the past few years the product range has grown rapidly to an extensive selection of printer and office supplies. The 123inkt.nl website receives over 550,000 visitors a month. 123inkt.nl is the current leader in online sales of printer supplies in the Netherlands with more than 40 percent year over year growth. 123inkt.nl’s growth stems from its ability to provide high-quality products as well as personal customer service, including next-day deliveries. 123inkt.nl has won numerous awards for “Best Online Store” in the Computer Hardware & Software category in the Netherlands every year since 2008.

The Challenge

The online space is a highly competitive market, where the end-user experience is an essential focus for online retailers such as 123inkt.nl. Optimizing website performance can have significant benefits, specifically by converting more clicks into sales through faster website performance. To meet the challenges associated with growth, 123inkt.nl exclusively sought a hardware-based load balancing solution for their new web platform, a solution that would improve uptime, include high-performance caching, and provide faster page loading time for end-users. Load tests were performed with vendors such as Cisco and Barracuda Networks as well as Linux Virtual Server (LVS). A10 Networks® was highly recommended by Quanza Engineering, an A10 Certified Partner.

The Solution

A10 Networks Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) showed an overall performance increase due to its proven dependability and wealth of features; as a result 123inkt.nl selected A10 ADCs for its network infrastructure upgrade. Due to the A10 ADCs and 123inkt.nl’s new server hardware platform, an overall performance increase resulted. “During our initial load test, performance increased by 22 percent over our installed system, right out of the box! A10 ADCs also had double digit performance gains over other tested systems,” explains Tim de Wolf, CIO at 123inkt.nl. A10 ADC allows for an optimal performance environment, which is especially attractive for 123inkt.nl to handle any peak traffic conditions that may arise, a particular focus for online retailers. 123inkt.nl conducted several tests to qualify the system response times comparing the old platform with no server load balancing solution, the Linux Virtual Server (LVS), and A10 ADCs. The tests verified that A10 ADCs could effortlessly handle an increasing load of concurrently active users on the website. This is especially important to 123inkt.nl, as the chosen platform needs to be able to handle sudden peaks in website traffic. In addition, making the right choice was especially critical for 123inkt.nl. Their investment had to be able to handle the company’s rapid growth.

Operational Impact

Superior High Availability (HA): Customer experience is a high priority for 123inkt.nl’s deployment where absolutely no downtime is tolerable. Stateful HA provides sub-second failover and session synchronization between A10 ADC appliances. This ensures continuous connectivity for an enhanced and reliable customer experience online. Furthermore, when network maintenance is performed, there is no impact to the end-user, as the process is always transparent and hitless.
Advanced SSL Offload: Processing SSL traffic on A10 ADC appliances seamlessly increases transaction speeds, decreases server hardware requirements, and provides ease of administration. A10 ADCs use dedicated SSL ASIC processors to relieve server hardware of the burden of managing CPU-intensive SSL traffic. This is extremely important with the industry’s rising standards for SSL encryption levels in the past few years, in addition to reducing the number of required servers to support transactions.
Increased HTTP RAM Caching: A10 ADCs provide faster client download of HTTP objects and improves web server scalability. 123inkt.nl’s customer online experience is greatly improved with the A10 ADCs’ dynamic HTTP RAM Caching feature, which increases application responsiveness by reducing CPU processing times when requesting content from the servers.
Enhanced Performance: A10 ADCs allow traffic to utilize multiple CPUs without latency or blocking; therefore applications run exponentially faster, especially during peak usage times. A10 ADCs’ Advanced Core Operating System (ACOS®) provides performance with zero IPC, zero interrupt, zero scheduling, zero locking and zero buffer copy; this linear non-blocking architecture ensures the lowest latency in packet processing. ACOS represents a new generation of ADC with greater performance, and the greatest performance per Watt, making A10 ADCs the most flexible, scalable and energy efficient solution on the market today.

Quantitative Benefit