Education Solution Provider Helps Customers Do More with Less Using F5 Solutions
Company Size
1,000+
Region
- America
Country
- United States
Product
- BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager
- BIG-IP Global Traffic Manager
- BIG-IP WebAccelerator
- BIG-IP Application Security Manager
Tech Stack
- iRules
- TMOS
- Virtualization Technology
Implementation Scale
- Enterprise-wide Deployment
Impact Metrics
- Cost Savings
- Productivity Improvements
Technology Category
- Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Application Development Platforms
- Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Connectivity Platforms
Applicable Industries
- Education
Applicable Functions
- Business Operation
Use Cases
- Cybersecurity
- Remote Asset Management
- Traffic Monitoring
Services
- Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
- System Integration
About The Customer
Hobsons is an education solution provider that was founded in 1974. The company provides web-based technologies that help educational institutions promote students’ readiness for college and the workplace, advance their marketing initiatives, recruit students, manage information, and deliver online tools that help increase student retention. Hobsons relies on a Software as a Service (SaaS) model, and delivering highly available and reliable applications to its customers is the company’s top priority. The company has to contend with significant increases in web traffic that coincides with student application and enrollment deadlines. Hobsons also has to support a range of users, including prospective students completing online applications and administrators needing access to the same systems for recruitment efforts and application reviews.
The Challenge
Hobsons, an education solution provider, delivers a suite of education-oriented Software as a Service (SaaS)-based applications to colleges and universities. These include web-based course and career planning, recruiting, enrollment, and retention tools. The company's application delivery infrastructure is mission-critical, and it has to manage significant increases in web traffic that coincide with student application and enrollment deadlines. Hobsons also has to support a range of users, including prospective students completing online applications and administrators needing access to the same systems for recruitment efforts and application reviews. The company needed a solution that could easily direct different types of traffic to different pools of servers and manage users’ authorization and access to various applications, without requiring modifications or adjustments on the customer's end.
The Solution
Hobsons implemented BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) at its four data centers, and BIG-IP Global Traffic Manager (GTM) at two of the data centers. The deployment coincided with the release of BIG-IP version 10 (v10), which enables BIG-IP LTM, BIG-IP WebAccelerator, and BIG-IP Application Security Manager (ASM) modules to run natively on F5’s TMOS plug-in architecture. Using iRules, Hobsons can easily direct traffic to the appropriate application server pools—whether physical or virtual—and manage the redirection of traffic from the data center that it closed to other locations, as well as from its legacy systems to its newer applications. To optimize the performance of its applications, Hobsons also uses BIG-IP WebAccelerator features, such as: Intelligent Browsing Referencing, SSL offload, and dynamic caching and compression.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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