Radware > Case Studies > Ipgarde Effortlessly Supports Customers’ Servers and Network Devices, with Radware’s AppDirector Solution

Ipgarde Effortlessly Supports Customers’ Servers and Network Devices, with Radware’s AppDirector Solution

Customer Company Size

SME

Region

Europe

Country

France

Product

Radware’s AppDirector

Tech Stack

Load Balancing
Virtual Hosting

Implementation Scale

Enterprise-wide Deployment

Impact Metrics

Cost Savings
Productivity Improvements

Technology Category

Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Data Exchange & Integration

Applicable Industries

Telecommunications

Applicable Functions

Discrete Manufacturing

Use Cases

Predictive Maintenance

Services

System Integration

About The Customer

Ipgarde, a small and fast-growing service provider based in France, hosts companies with servers and network devices in a virtualized environment. While sales are managed from its Paris office, its technical team operates from Lyon, where it has 1200 dedicated servers. Secondary datacenters are located in Paris, Marseille and Geneva. Established in 2004, Ipgarde has built a strong customer base of corporate clients, including well-known names such as April Group, Ascom, AFP (Agence France Presse), AMP Interactive, ESA (European Space Agency), Decathlon, EasyRencontre, Publicis and Veolia. The company’s multiple datacenters are interconnected in BGP4 (Border Gateway Protocol) with multiple Telcos (France Telecom, Interoute, Cogent, Level3, 9Telecom and others), with real time optimization (Internap FCP technology).

The Challenge

Ipgarde, a service provider based in France, hosts corporate customers’ servers and network devices in a virtualized environment. The company was using an open source solution for load balancing, but it could not fully guarantee easy configuration and migration, and 24/7 connectivity. The company was also facing challenges in testing server availability and load balancing, guaranteeing the availability of customer websites without disrupting the existing infrastructure and servers. The company’s existing open source solution did not support one-leg configuration. As servers were not being used optimally, another challenge was to reduce the number of public IP addresses used, by creating just one IP address which in turn would manage the flow of information to additional IP addresses, decreasing the overload on the CPU. Additionally, Ipgarde has been experiencing some DoS attacks, particularly from customer websites due to insufficient firewall protection.

The Solution

Ipgarde deployed Radware’s AppDirector, which enables continuous availability for Ipgarde’s customers by eliminating traffic surges, server bottlenecks, disconnection of connectivity and downtime, while redirecting traffic via load balancing, thus relieving CPUs of unnecessary resources. AppDirector’s “Pay-as-you-Grow” scalability option, allows Ipgarde to upgrade to a higher bandwidth as per client requirements. AppDirector equipped Ipgarde with a disaster recovery plan which enables servers in secondary datacenters to guarantee availability if the primary servers do not respond effectively. This global redirection enables 24/7 connectivity, while minimizing any downtime. AppDirector was integrated into the Ipgarde infrastructure as the front end for the company’s web hosted applications. As many of Ipgarde’s customers were familiar with Radware’s AppDirector, the company improved virtual hosting capabilities, availability of web applications and performance of SaaS (software as a service).

Operational Impact

AppDirector provides Ipgarde with organized technical support – a vast improvement over its previous open source solution.
Ipgarde customers now enjoy a complete “Application Delivery Solution” instead of the straightforward “load balancing” offered by competitors, with easy integration and migration without downtime.
Ipgarde has improved its virtual hosting capabilities and availability of web applications.
As a result of AppDirector’s intrinsic scalability, Ipgarde has lower CAPEX and OPEX costs.