* Political group MoveOn.org gets a Web boost
Political organization MoveOn.org started in 1998 when a couple of concerned citizens wanted to see the country “move on” from talk of former President Clinton’s personal affairs to more pertinent political issues. At its inception, the organization didn’t have to worry too much about overloading Web servers, but with about 2.7 million members now communicating via e-mail and the Web, performance has become a hot-button issue.
“The group realized to keep democracy in motion, so to speak, we had to re-evaluate the load-balancing strategy,” says Patrick Kane, system architect for MoveOn, in Berkeley, Calif. Kane works for the outsourcing consultancy We Also Walk Dogs, which is headquartered in Chicago. The firm handles IT services and delivery for MoveOn. Kane works closely with MoveOn to ensure the online donation page (MoveOn is a nonprofit organization) remains secure and available.
“When the election heated up this year, MoveOn wanted to ensure the 70 million people working in 17 battleground states would get access to 13 million voter files online,” Kane says.
In August, the group started using Equalizer Extreme and Equalizer XCEL to manage traffic on its Web site, and according to Kane, the site experienced a 50% decrease in the average response time for requests with Equalizer in place. The group uses 25 front-end Web servers and a pair of databases on the back end to ensure its online presence is available and secure. Kane says MoveOn didn’t want to have to add infrastructure.
“Two sort of big wins are that Coyote Point tools give us control over where the requests end up and we can tailor request distribution to what users have access to,” he explains. “Server response times to requests dropped by close to 50%, without us having to add any hardware.”
Coyote Point’s Equalizer Extreme is based on an Intel server architecture. The company earlier this year teamed with Dell to offer its load-balancing, SSL acceleration device on a PowerEdge 1750 server.
Coyote Point’s product sits at the edge of a data center and balances traffic among Web and application servers. The device can offload SSL encryption from servers. This could let Web servers that process sensitive data – such as online donations via credit cards – run faster and handle more connections.
For MoveOn, security features in Coyote Point products made the move to its systems easy.
“The SSL-encrypted Web technology plays a big role in making sure when folks come to donate they can do so without worry,” Kane says. “Even if someone were to come and take the load balancers away the key information that donators made would stay and be protected.”
