Newport City Homes ousts 'poorly performing' Microsoft load balancing in favour of JetNexus

Microsoft NLB did not offer 'acceptable level of service' for end users says IS manager

Housing organisation Newport City Homes has jettisoned a Microsoft software load balancing solution in favour of a service provided by JetNexus.

"It was taking roughly 20 seconds to download the homepage of our website using Windows NLB," said Owen Barrett, information services manager of Newport City Homes.

"This is not an acceptable level of service for our end-users."

Barrett said Newport City Homes had taken "Microsoft recommendations for SharePoint deployment", and the company had suggested its own load balancer, Windows NLB.

"However, once the infrastructure element of the project was completed and testing started, it became apparent that Windows Server NLB was not suitable in this case," said Barrett.

According to Newport City Homes, the load balancing market was "thoroughly reviewed", but it was the "personal engagement process and outstanding evaluation offered by JetNexus that impressed it most".

Cost was also an issue. "Based on past experiences, I anticipated that a load balancing solution with the functionality that we required would be cost prohibitive," said Barrett. "However, we were very impressed with JetNexus from the outset. Their Accelerating Load Balancer Extreme (ALB-X) appliance represented excellent value for money, whilst fitting in with our current platform and virtual environment," said Barrett.

Barrett has noted "considerable benefits" since going live with JetNexus.

"Under Windows NLB the performance of our website wasn't great. We saw an immediate improvement when we deployed the ALB-X appliances including an 18 second reduction in load times, which in turn enables us to provide a faster and more user-friendly experience," he said.

While Newport City Homes is sticking with Microsoft Lync 2010 and Exchange 2010 for its communication products, it aims to keep the company's load balancer out of the picture, maintaining the JetNexus solution across both these services as well.