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Case study: Kemp load balancers resolve issues for Now IT
Mon, 15th Jul 2019
FYI, this story is more than a year old

Australian IT specialist Now IT Solutions, which offers a single point of call for all business technology needs, faced a problem when its load balancer was unable to share information with Amazon Web Service's relational database, or access Microsoft Exchange.

The situation placed restraints on Now IT's ability to service major customers.

The company had been using Microsoft's network load balancing solution and other Linux-based load balancers.

Ultimately their CTO, Stephen Tonna, and his team resolved the issues by prioritising the customer experience with technology from Kemp.

Now IT operates predominantly across Australia's east coast.

The company has 45 technical people among a staff of 60.

Customers range from small to medium commercial businesses to multi-site corporate networks.

Now IT solutions incorporate cutting-edge technology, utilising equipment from some of the best hardware manufacturers, backed by first-grade warranty and support packages.

IT support packages include remote management and support, voice and data network solutions, server/workstation hardware and related accessories, retail point-of-sale solutions, office printing solutions and in-house graphic artist and web design.

The company's infrastructure includes four internally run data centers at different locations, each running client systems.

Now IT also leverages public cloud hosting as needed.

“Since our previous load balancer was unable to support key aspects of our infrastructure, we looked around for alternatives,” says Tonna.

“After a careful evaluation, we chose Kemp for its ease of use and its support for application templates.

Implementation was straightforward.

Initially, Tonna's team set up the virtual services on individual virtual machines, one data center at a time.

“Then these were migrated to high availability pairs, which was relatively quick and easy,” says Tonna.

The Kemp load balancers handle more than 4,000 users, generating about 1.3TB of email each month, representing more than three million-plus emails sent and received.

Other applications supported include remote desktop services including gateways and brokers, with over 3,500 users' connections.

Tonna says the benefits and improvements resulting from implementing Kemp load balancers have been far-reaching.

“We are seeing a simplified user experience, faster times to delivery, cost savings in the way of man-hours to deploy and the ability to do more and focus on other tasks. We're also seeing reductions in issues and troubleshooting time as we have a consistent access method.

“Furthermore, Kemp gear allows us to scale up client access to our data center resources and applications, as well as improving redundancy and high availability.

For the future, as Now IT expands, the tech team will integrate the company's own data centers and infrastructure with public cloud infrastructures.

They will use Kemp to provide load balancing services for email and remote desktop services across multiple data centers and cloud hosting providers.

Tonna concludes: “Any systems we install need to be of a high availability design with no single points of failure. Where load balancing is required, Kemp is our preferred option.