The core functions that Rush Order undertakes are prime determinants of customer satisfaction-among them, online ordering, credit card processing, order fulfillment, worldwide shipping, and inventory control. For Rush Order itself, then, everything depends of 24x7 uptime, swift page downloads, and reliable sticky connections during transaction processing. To secure the reliability and efficiency of its infrastructure in advance of the 1999 holiday season, Rush Order went shopping for a load balancing solution. Equalizer, an intelligent load balancing appliance, routes incoming traffic among server clusters, using multiple criteria to determine which server is best equipped to take each hit.
Equalizer provides failover by detecting server failure and automatically bypassing failed servers.
Active Content Verification tests all components of each server in each cluster, ensuring that not only server hardware but the server operating system and application software are fully operational. At one point, one of our servers was down for two days, and our customers had no idea. Equalizer routed incoming traffic around the down server without any detectable service degradation. In addition to providing server failover, Equalizer kept traffic flowing smoothly during the record-breaking 1999 holiday season. Our peak came in November, when at one point we processed well over 200,000 users in a 3-day period for just one of our clients.