Coyote Point lightens the load at Wet Seal

Name: GREG MAXWELL
Title: E-commerce development manager
Company: Wet Seal, a clothing retailer
Location: Foothill Ranch, Calif.

Favorite product: Coyote Point Systems' Equalizer E350GX 

I probably started using Coyotes in '94-'95, before I came to Wet Seal, as one of the lowest-cost alternatives for providing a front-end service for a lot of small Web servers, which meant we didn't need to buy a big Web server. Since then, I've pretty much used Coyote for all my front-end load balancing. It provides the ultimate flexibility for handling high demand for a poor-performance Web application.

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Name: GREG MAXWELL
Title: E-commerce development manager
Company: Wet Seal, a clothing retailer
Location: Foothill Ranch, Calif.

Favorite product: Coyote Point Systems' Equalizer E350GX 

I probably started using Coyotes in '94-'95, before I came to Wet Seal, as one of the lowest-cost alternatives for providing a front-end service for a lot of small Web servers, which meant we didn't need to buy a big Web server. Since then, I've pretty much used Coyote for all my front-end load balancing. It provides the ultimate flexibility for handling high demand for a poor-performance Web application.

When I came to Wet Seal in 2004, it had been running individual Web servers and didn't have a load-balancing solution. Once we started growing, I bought a couple of Coyotes, probably in 2005. I have two, to run in a high-availability combination. Back then I had three servers and now I have seven front-end and four back-end servers, so a total of 11.

One of the main extra things I like is that we can offload the SSL processing to it. I'm able to use a simple front-end and keep things uncomplicated for my consumers by not using SSL on the actual Web servers. It also fixed a cookie problem for us. When a user transfers from a regular to SSL server, we had to do a check to see if the user already had a cookie, so we kind of bounced users twice to see if they have the right information when they show up on the Web server, and that's not necessary now.

I'm also using the compression now, and that's helped take 120 megabits per second of bandwidth down to about 70.

Next up: Splunk log analyzer software

I'd like to be able to use Splunk to identify Web application performance clogs via a centralized control point. I have a problematic back-end Web server. An application loads up and clogs up servers. We don't know why. During Christmas time, I basically had to keep bouncing servers to keep connections up and running. So it was really annoying. But Splunk can watch the logs and see what errors come up, and then allow me to script a process to bounce the server that's in trouble.

Dream tool: Enhanced open source IP monitoring and log analysis components

What I'd like to see is a SolarWinds ipMonitor-type product with better small screen push technology and batch job skills – meaning, native SSH support – and then add better decision- making skills. Then we'd have the monitoring also working with a Splunk-type tool so we could then watch both ends of the service, public and server log levels. So I think if you took SolarWinds and Splunk and tied them together, you'd get a fairly powerful product. I'm not necessarily looking for this combo product but the pieces that would let me make one.

Pleasant surprises: Fortinet FortiGate-1000A firewall; Breach Security Web Application Firewall

These have been doing much better than originally anticipated, with less management and monitoring. As a retailer, I have a PCI requirement to do a monthly scan to make sure our Web servers aren't susceptible to third-party attack. In the last two years, Fortinet has implemented intrusion detection, which is working very well for common, known threats so that I'm able to basically capture 80% or better of what scanners and public hackers throw at me.