News and Entertainment Portals

News and entertainment portals typically attract large numbers of visitors who will request rich, bandwidth-heavy media, such as images, audio and video. The traffic load is also susceptible to sudden surges triggered by external events such as a breaking news story or an online event.

These types of organisation typically need a traffic manager or load balancer to front-end their media serving clusters which can cope with the high traffic loads both during normal and peak times. If there is insufficient capacity available to meet demand, the organization may want lower-bandwidth versions of static and streaming content to be served instead of the usual versions to ease the strain on the servers.

Skyrock

“ZXTM gets Skyrock closer to its listeners”

When it comes to flexibility and speed, ZXTM outperforms any other solution we've looked at.

Frank Denis, System Administrator, Skyrock
Case Study

Case study: Skyrock

The entertainment portal of Skyrock, a French radio station, is the most popular site in France. As a result, it comes under immense load on a daily basis.

The challenge

Skyrock needed to improve the performance of their Apache web servers without having to invest in more hardware or replace them. They had previously used an architecture based on the Squid proxy server, but it was inadequate for their needs.

The solution

ZXTM was deployed to manage all the network traffic to Skyrock's web sites. In doing so, Skyrock has established significantly higher performance and a more stable foundation for their web sites than Squid or hardware load balancers were able to provide.

The payback

By placing ZXTM in front of their Apache servers, Skyrock has been able to greatly increase their capacity and system stability. Their site now handle over 220,000 hits a minute on a single Xeon processor running ZXTM. In their words, "ZXTM has been rock-solid".

Key solution features

TrafficScript™ - The most intuitive and powerful traffic inspection and manipulation language available on the market
WAN Offload - Accelerates applications such as Apache by as much as 100 times, and servers such as BEA WebLogic and IBM WebSphere by as much as 10 times