FFF Enterprises Increases Performance and Flexibility for Online Vaccine Purchasing Application
Company Size
1,000+
Region
- America
Country
- United States
Product
- A10 ADC
- aFleX
- Imperva SecureSphere
Tech Stack
- Layer 4-7 server load balancing
- SSL acceleration/offload
- Advanced Core Operating System (ACOS)
- TCL programming language
Implementation Scale
- Enterprise-wide Deployment
Impact Metrics
- Customer Satisfaction
- Digital Expertise
- Productivity Improvements
Technology Category
- Application Infrastructure & Middleware - API Integration & Management
- Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Data Exchange & Integration
- Cybersecurity & Privacy - Application Security
Applicable Industries
- Healthcare & Hospitals
- Pharmaceuticals
Applicable Functions
- Business Operation
- Sales & Marketing
Use Cases
- Cybersecurity
- Predictive Maintenance
- Remote Asset Management
Services
- Cybersecurity Services
- Software Design & Engineering Services
- System Integration
About The Customer
FFF Enterprises, founded in 1988, is a multidimensional healthcare company and the nation’s largest distributor of plasma products, vaccines, and other biopharmaceuticals. It serves over 80% of U.S. hospitals and supplies the nation’s leading non-acute care group purchasing organizations. MyFluVaccine™ (www.myfluvaccine.com), delivered by FFF Enterprises, is the nation’s first online vaccine portal, allowing vaccine providers to order a dedicated supply of vaccines for guaranteed delivery on the dates they choose. To run the MyFluVaccine™ portal, FFF Enterprises has a data center of Web servers that serve up the online vaccine purchasing application. Users from clinics, pharmacies, and hospitals leverage the MyFluVaccine™ portal regularly.
The Challenge
During the flu season, pharmacies, hospitals, and doctors’ offices increase activity on the MyFluVaccine™ portal, creating peak usage conditions. To prepare for the flu season peak, FFF Enterprises began evaluating Juniper’s DX line of server load balancers to ensure MyFluVaccine’s™ performance and availability to customers. However, shortly after the initial evaluation, Juniper announced it would end of life its DX family with a smooth transition for customers. FFF Enterprises concurrently read about A10 Networks® Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) in the news, highlighting recent independent third-party performance from the Tolly Group, which proved that A10 ADC delivers over double the performance at less than half the price of incumbents. As a result, FFF Enterprises chose to evaluate the A10 ADC, a next-generation server load balancer platform that has garnered numerous awards for its multi-core CPU architecture that is tuned for high volume web applications such as MyFluVaccine™.
The Solution
FFF Enterprises selected A10 ADCs’ Advanced Traffic Manager as it delivers all the required features to ensure the MyFluVaccine™ portal performs as desired, especially during peak usage conditions. The key A10 ADC features that FFF Enterprises leverages include Layer 4-7 server load balancing, SSL acceleration/offload, application persistence, and aFleX® for advanced scripting. With SSL acceleration/offload, CPU intensive encrypted traffic required for Web transactions is offloaded by the A10 ADC server load balancer. This reduces the number of servers required to support Web transactions, while at the same time increasing transaction speed so that more orders can be processed in the same amount of time. For MyFluVaccine™, the A10 ADC provides FFF Enterprises with application persistence to the same server across ports and domain names, ensuring a positive Web experience for customers placing orders in the portal. FFF Enterprises is leveraging the aFleX advanced scripting tool to customize policies to manipulate Layer 7 traffic, which can eliminate traffic bottlenecks during peak usage conditions. aFleX is based on the industry-standard TCL programming language and does not suffer from performance degradation when numerous features are turned on, due to A10 ADCs’ scalable Advanced Core Operating System (ACOS®) architecture that is tuned for multi-core CPUs. FFF Enterprises also deployed Imperva’s SecureSphere Web Application Firewall to secure Web applications and comply with PCI regulations. A10 Networks and Imperva partner to deliver the industry’s best-of-breed server load balancer and application firewall solution.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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