Thomson Scientific and Healthcare Achieves Premium Application Performance and Business Continuity with F5 Solutions
Wednesday 08 November 2006Leading provider of R&D information ensures seamless failover between multiple data centers, improving application recovery time by 98.8%.
F5 Networks Inc. announced that Thomson Scientific and Healthcare (TSH) is using F5 products to achieve optimal application availability and business continuity for its research and development applications and databases worldwide. With F5, TSH has reduced server recovery time from an average of two hours to 90 seconds, representing a 98.8% improvement in application recovery.
TSH, one of four market groups within the Thomson Corporation (NYSE: TOC; TSX: TOC)-a conglomerate reporting approximately $8.4 billion in annual revenue-provides research and development information solutions that assist researchers, information specialists, and professionals in biotechnology, chemistry, engineering, healthcare, law, financial services, higher education, reference information, corporate training, and assessment.
TSH's state-of-the-art network infrastructure consists of three data centers worldwide. As global demand for TSH's web applications grew, so did the need for rapid site recovery and transparent failover between these data centers. Moreover, TSH clients pay for uninterrupted, integrated information access from locations around the world. Failure by TSH to meet crucial Service Level Agreements (SLAs) could result in costly customer refunds.
F5's BIG-IP® Local Traffic Manager (LTM) and Global Traffic Manager (GTM) provide the redundancy and high availability required to support TSH's global network infrastructure. BIG-IP GTM, located at the edge of each data center, directs TSH's customers to the nearest and best performing data center, based on network conditions. End-user requests are then passed through the BIG-IP LTM, which sits in each of the company's data centers and distributes applications across the best performing local area servers. With F5's solution, TSH is able to meet its business-critical SLAs by providing the continuous application access their customers require.
""We continue to be extremely satisfied with the value and efficiency F5 delivers to our customers and internal IT team," said James McGhee, Lead Network Engineer at Thomson Scientific and Healthcare. "Through F5's application delivery solutions, customers can rely on Thomson Scientific for the information they need, regardless of unanticipated data center challenges. Plus, F5's iRules functionality enables us to better manage session IDs and provides the L7 fluency required to enhance our customers' application performance and user experience."
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""Thomson Scientific and Healthcare supplies invaluable resources to professionals in the research and development sector worldwide," said Jason Needham, Director of Product Management at F5. "F5's robust TMOS platform provides a highly programmable, intelligent, and flexible foundation for our application delivery networking products. This architecture allows enterprises like Thomson Scientific and Healthcare to significantly enhance web traffic virtualization and management, enabling them to improve application performance and efficiency on a global scale."
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