DEPLOYMENT GUIDE
Deploying Blackboard’s Academic Suite
with Stingray Traffic Manager
Deploying Blackboard Academic Suite with Stingray Traffic Manager
INTRODUCTION
Blackboard’s Academic Suite™ facilitates learning and knowledge transfer within an educational environment. The different
products are provided to the user with a unified look and feel for easy end-user use. The applications themselves run on BEA’s
Weblogic servers, presenting the user with a fast and robust experience.
BEA WebLogic™ is a powerful, mature J2EE Application Server, forming the basis of one of the leading internet application
development platforms. More than 13,000 customers worldwide use BEA WebLogic Server to provide a reliable framework for
scalable and secure applications.
Stingray Traffic Manager has been certified for use with BEA-hosted applications
Riverbed® Stingray™ Traffic Manager was the first application traffic management product to pass BEA’s stringent Validation
Program, so customers can be assured of seamless interoperability between the two products.
Why use Stingray Traffic Manager to manage traffic to Blackboard installations?
Blackboard is a mission-critical application for a Universities e-learning program, and needs to be reliable, secure and provide a
high level of performance.
As part of the solution, Stingray Traffic Manager can:
• Improve the reliability of the Blackboard suite
• Make it easier to manage clusters of
application servers
• Secure the application environment
• Improve the performance
Benefit 1: Service Reliability
Stingray Traffic Manager provides a reliable single pointof-entry to a cluster of BEA WebLogic servers running
the Blackboard Academic Suite. With a combination of
health and performance measurements, Stingray Traffic
Manager routes incoming requests to the fastestresponding servers and avoids servers that are failed or
underperforming. User sessions are automatically detected
and honored.
Managing traffic to Blackboard installations using Stingray Traffic Manager
Benefit 2: Better ROI through Application Acceleration
Stingray Traffic Manager has been proven to:
• As much as double the transaction rate that can be achieved from WebLogic servers,
with no additional software or server tuning.
• Double the response speed, under sustained load from multiple clients.
• Provide over 15-times the SSL performance.
• Eliminate all errors for all but the most demanding tests.
© 2011 Riverbed Technology. All rights reserved.
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Deploying Blackboard Academic Suite with Stingray Traffic Manager
Benefit 3: Improved Security
Stingray Traffic Manager acts as a single point of entry, isolating the WebLogic servers and managing traffic to them. Capabilities
like request and response scrubbing, request validation and request rate shaping help to place your WebLogic servers in as
secure an environment as possible.
Benefit 4: Lower Management Costs
Stingray Traffic Manager’s advanced request routing and manipulation, driven by a fully programmable TrafficScript rules engine
and remote standards-based Control API, gives you full flexibility to manage both your network traffic and server resources.
Find out more…
Improving the Performance of BEA WebLogic with Stingray Traffic Manager
Riverbed commissioned Broadband-Testing, a respected independent performance specialist, to investigate how
Stingray Traffic Manager's Application Acceleration capabilities could improve the performance and reliability of
BEA WebLogic server.
http://www.riverbed.com/news/pdf/white_papers/acceleration_weblogic.pdf
BEA WebLogic Deployment Guide (Stingray Traffic Manager)
Stingray Traffic Manager was the first traffic manager to pass BEA's Validation Program, so end users can be
assured of interoperability between the two products. This document describes the best practises developed
during the certification program.
http://www.riverbed.com/news/pdf/white_papers/bea_deployment.pdf
For further information, please contact a Riverbed representative to discuss your needs. Contact details are located at the end of
this document.
About Riverbed
Riverbed delivers performance for the globally connected enterprise. With Riverbed, enterprises can successfully and intelligently
implement strategic initiatives such as virtualization, consolidation, cloud computing, and disaster recovery without fear of
compromising performance. By giving enterprises the platform they need to understand, optimize, and consolidate their IT,
Riverbed helps enterprises to build a fast, fluid and dynamic IT architecture that aligns with the business needs of the
organization. Additional information about Riverbed (NASDAQ: RVBD) is available at www.riverbed.com.
Riverbed Technology, Inc.
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San Francisco, CA 94105
Tel: (415) 247-8800
www.riverbed.com
© 2011 Riverbed Technology. All rights reserved.
Riverbed Technology Ltd.
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United Kingdom
Tel: +44 1344 31 7100
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Tel: +81 3 5419 1990
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