Case Study: GDSX
| Company |
GDSX, Ltd. |
"ScaleOut StateServer was the perfect solution for our distributed caching and synchronization needs."
Chris Kolb
Manager - IT and Databases
GDSX, Ltd. |
| Application |
Reservation data processing services for travel industry |
| Server configuration |
Back-end application servers, front-end Terminal Servers, and 3 node StateServer cluster |
| Reason for deployment |
To ensure real time synchronization of critical data for application servers, without sacrificing performance |
| Results |
Application servers instantly have necessary data to run distributed applications and are synchronized |
Background
GDSX supplies software and services to corporate clients in the travel industry. Customer data is pulled from proprietary third-party vendors and is processed through various customer-specified workflows by an application server farm. The data that is waiting to be processed must be load balanced based on the resources available to the application servers.
Challenges
To run their applications across the server farm, GDSX needed to find a way to ensure that certain state information for load balancing was always in synch and updated in real-time for every application server in the farm. They investigated database solutions, but determined that they were too slow to meet the needs of their applications, and to make them highly available they would have to be clustered; a very expensive solution. They also needed a high-performance way to ensure that each application server could process data from any customer, while guaranteeing that each customer would only be processed by one server at a time. That's when they discovered ScaleOut StateServer and decided to use distributed caching to maintain the critical data in memory.
Results
| Since deploying ScaleOut StateServer the application tier has been running smoothly and efficiently. Performance across the servers is enhanced since data is very close to the applications that need it. "ScaleOut StateServer was very easy to install and configure and it runs with essentially zero management attention," said Chris Kolb, Manager - IT and Databases for GDSX.
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Deployment Details
GDSX has deployed ScaleOut StateServer as a distributed cache on three application servers that are connected to terminal servers and web servers on the front-end. The front-end servers are running ScaleOut Remote Client which provides GDSX's client applications with a highly available link to the distributed cache.
The application servers have 2GB of memory each and are connected via a fast ethernet network. The load balanced web tier connects to the application tier via a fast ethernet network.
Based on the success of using distributed caching, GDSX has plans to expand its use of ScaleOut StateServer to cache other data in memory for faster overall performance.
About GDSX
Dallas-based GDSX, Ltd. is a software developer and computer services provider to the travel industry, specializing in the automation of QC, reservation finishing and travel fulfillment services. COMPLEAT, the company's flagship product, enables subscribers to define and implement fully automated processes of touchless travel fulfillment, CRM, and service delivery. Although a relative newcomer to the US marketplace, COMPLEAT processes reservations from more than 4 million travelers in 31 countries around the globe. GDSX was formed in 2002 and is in Plano, TX, near Dallas.
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