Radware > Case Studies > Radware’s Application Front End Solution for AccuWeather

Radware’s Application Front End Solution for AccuWeather

Company Size

1,000+

Region

America

Country

United States

Product

Radware’s AMS solution
Radware’s AFE solution
Radware’s Insite management and monitoring tool

Tech Stack

Network Architecture
IP applications

Implementation Scale

Enterprise-wide Deployment

Impact Metrics

Brand Awareness
Customer Satisfaction

Technology Category

Application Infrastructure & Middleware - API Integration & Management
Networks & Connectivity - Network Management & Analysis Software

Applicable Industries

Telecommunications

Applicable Functions

Business Operation

Use Cases

Real-Time Location System (RTLS)
Remote Asset Management

Services

Software Design & Engineering Services
System Integration

About The Customer

AccuWeather is recognized by 180 million Americans as the leader in weather forecasts and climate information. It serves an average of five to six million users a day. When regions across the globe are hit with severe weather conditions such as hurricanes and snowstorms, traffic volume increases to 15 million hits a day. It is essential for AccuWeather.com to maintain customer satisfaction by providing exceptional weather service capabilities 24/7. The company has a large network of servers, concurrent connections, and millions of hits to its website per day.

The Challenge

AccuWeather, the world’s largest online commercial weather service, serves an average of 5 to 6 million users a day. However, when regions across the globe are hit with severe weather conditions such as hurricanes and snowstorms, traffic volume increases to 15 million hits a day. This surge in traffic presents a significant challenge for the company as it needs to ensure 24/7 information availability under these conditions. Therefore, Accuweather required a solution that would allow them to dynamically scale and add server capacity to handle the increased traffic. The company also needed to maintain customer satisfaction by providing exceptional weather service capabilities 24/7. It was crucial for AccuWeather's network to be available and optimized for web access 24/7 for critical weather information.

The Solution

To address these challenges, AccuWeather implemented Radware’s Application Front End Solution (AFE). This solution guarantees the optimized operation of servers across AccuWeather.com for high performing IP applications. It also provides full access to mission critical applications and databases by examining all AccuWeather.com server resources and intelligently redirecting traffic to the best available site. To ensure the fastest response time to end users, Radware’s load balancing algorithms distribute traffic across AccuWeather’s servers for full responsiveness, ensuring the best reliable service from click to content. Radware’s AFE also enables AccuWeather to easily and dynamically scale capacity and performance by adding servers to support increased traffic surges. This allows AccuWeather a transparent adjustment of the capacity required by providing more access and redundancy for the best user experience.

Operational Impact

AccuWeather relies on Radware’s AFE solution to maintain 99.99% availability and reliability of its website so it can provide unparalleled, continuous service to its customers.
It also easily and cost-effectively manages the devices in an infrastructure that needs to connect as many as 78 servers with Radware’s Insite management and monitoring tool.
Whether AccuWeather administrators need to add or remove servers, alter server capacity, obtain performance statistics or manage server resources- monitoring and control over servers and IP application performance is easy and cost effective.

Quantitative Benefit