Emergency Reporting, a provider of centralized web-based reporting and management systems for first responders, is known for pioneering the development of centralized web-based NFIRS, NEMSIS and risk assessment reporting and records management system. In typical situations, first responders have to access multiple software programs to capture data and report on the situation.
The company provides a centralized system by integrating the national fire and EMS dataset standards. The resulting system minimizes the complexity of data management, which saves both time and money. With the type of information captured and the customers supported, the application has to be available, secure and perform according to expectations.
“Our business was growing so rapidly that we simply needed greater performance and flexibility,” stated Steve Stedman, CTO for Emergency Reporting, in a case study. “We required a far more robust application delivery solution that would not only support our existing infrastructure but also be able to scale well into the future.”
To achieve load balancing, Emergency Reporting initially deployed Microsoft (News - Alert) ISA Server, yet the organization was experiencing an expansion and its needs were quickly surpassing the capabilities of the software-based solution. Emergency Reporting was experiencing increased traffic and a heavy burden on the servers when processing secure transactions resulted in slow page loads and poor overall response times.
The company was under intense pressure to make a change through load balancing as more than 46,000 users were accessing its service at any given time. Emergency Reporting needed to improve application delivery technology to ensure their customers gained non-stop access to their critical applications and services.
One move was to migrate to a new data center to increase support and performance for all customers. To achieve load balancing, the company deployed a pair of Coyote Point Equalizer E350GXs to manage traffic across 25 Hyper-V (virtual) servers running Microsoft IIS.
Emergency Reporting configured the Equalizer appliance in a redundant configuration with a second Equalizer to guarantee the highest level of application availability. The company was able to instantly speed up application performance and response times by offloading CPU-intensive SSL transactions from their servers to the Equalizer.
“Switching to the Coyote Point Equalizers was one of the best decisions we’ve made,” said Stedman. “I have had experience with F5 in the past and Equalizer provides all of the functionality of the Big-IP at a fraction of the cost. I would recommend Coyote Point’s Equalizer to anyone looking for a reliable and powerful application delivery solution.”
Emergency Reporting now enjoys 100 percent availability as a result of the deployment of the E350GXs in an H/A configuration. As a result, application availability will never be compromised.
Susan J. Campbell is a contributing editor for TMCnet and has also written for eastbiz.com. To read more of Susan’s articles, please visit her columnist page.Edited by Patrick Barnard