Balancing act: when real estate listing service NWMLS switched to multihoming, it found that a load-balancing solution was also necessary - Cover Story

Communications News,  May, 2003  

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"Our customers no longer have to pay the price if one of our providers has problems or is getting flooded," explains Johnson. "There's no more down time or waiting while third-party ISPs try to find the issue. There's no more latency in failing over or waiting for our routers' tables to update through the Internet. It's a whole new level of high availability for Internet connectivity--failover is instantaneous."

NETWORK CAPACITY INCREASED

By using the product, NWMLS also increased its network capacity, according to Williams. "By moving away from BGP, we've seen a 15% increase of CPU availability on routers and freed up memory that was previously used for maintaining BGP tables. Using this solution also relieves the stress of making BGP changes that could affect router performance outside our network."

Since deploying the solution, the prospect of adding additional providers and links is also much less daunting. "With BGP, we had to coordinate with providers," says Johnson. "Now, everything is just a static route. All we have to do is add a provider--without involving the ISPs, without affecting the performance of our routing and without being forced to architect the change in our network.

"Now, we configure our router, add the necessary configuration changes to a new link within the controller, and we're done." NWMLS recently increased its WAN connections to include nine T-1 lines from three different providers.

Finally, NWMLS realized other business benefits from its ability to better monitor the traffic passing over its links. "The traffic watching capabilities in the product are great," says Johnson. "Before, we could never see what data the routers/providers were getting. Now we can see what services are being sent to each ISP and for whom. This gives us a better understanding of how our resources are being utilized and provides a better view into our network for troubleshooting and capacity planning.

"The product also greatly simplified our multihoming environment, giving us more flexibility and control to ensure that our site is reliable and fast," he adds. "The end result is we can build our business on Internet technologies and, at the same time, optimize and have visibility into our bandwidth investments."

The question remains, though. Why did Johnson and his team struggle with BGP for so long before deciding on link load-balancing technology?

"To be honest, this technology is so new, I didn't know it yet existed on the market," he answers. "I thought we were doing what everyone else was doing with BGP. And so were the other people on the team."

Having experienced a series of Internet outages and the struggles to deploy a mulitihoming solution with BGP, Johnson and company were happy to find a different approach that is helping to keep their business connected.

About F5 Networks

F5 Networks is led by John McAdam, who has served as president, CEO and a director since July 2000. Prior to joining F5 Networks, he served as general manager of the Web server sales business at IBM. From January 1995 until August 1999, he served as the president and COO of Sequent Computer Systems, a manufacturer of high-end open systems, which was sold to IBM in September 1999. He holds a degree in computer science from the University of Glasgow, Scotland.