CASE STUDY
Top 3 US Retailer Auto-Scales Applications
With Avi Networks Inline analytics and Software Load Balancer
Company:
Top-3 US Department Store chain
Industry:
Retail and E-commerce
Challenges:
Company Background
The “company” is among the top 3 US Department Store chains and offers clothing, housewares,
and other accessories to consumers. It operates over 800 stores across the US and generates
multi-billion dollars in annual revenue through retail stores and online sales.
IT Infrastructure
• Build dynamic application
delivery infrastructure to
support spiky demand
• Accelerate application
deployment and deployment
cycles
• Eliminate static overprovisioning
and reduce operational
complexity
As one of the largest retailers and e-tailers, the IT infrastructure is critical to the company’s
core business. The company operates multiple large data centers for hosting customer-facing
e-commerce applications as well as internal applications for its business operations. The company
has a large application development and operations (DevOps) organization for its businesscritical applications.
Solution:
Lack of on-demand scaling of its business applications, especially around the holiday season
that’s associated with unpredictable spikes in user-demand, was getting in the way of critical
business operations, requiring capacity overprovisioning and resulting in higher cost.
• Avi Networks CADP – softwaredefined application delivery and
analytics
• Auto-scaling of application
infrastructure and network
services
• Automated deployment with
centralized management and
monitoring
Benefits:
• Guaranteed business SLAs by
dynamically scaling server and
app delivery infrastructure
based on real-time analytics
• Reduced server CapEx by
30% by eliminating capacity
overprovisioning
• Increased application
development efficiency by 25%
via programmable app delivery
infrastructure
Business Challenges
The company was facing two challenges with its application infrastructure:
Static Infrastructure and Capacity Overprovisioning
Their pricing application was a prime example. In order to react to customers’ buying behavior
and other market forces, every department made frequent pricing updates in their centralized
pricing application at specific times of the day. The traffic on the pricing app would spike
just before the cutoff times as all the
departments tried to squeeze in their
updates before the deadline. The steadystate server capacity was insufficient to
serve these requests. Without additional
server capacity, the application users faced
significant delays and occasionally missed
the cutoff time, causing a direct impact on
the company’s revenues.
Without an on-demand scale offered by their
compute infrastructure, the server team was
forced to overprovision the capacity by up to
50%. This was a significant waste of resources
since the additional capacity was not utilized
for most of the day.
Figure 1: On-demand scaling of
application infrastructure
Slow Application Development Cycle
The company’s development organization had multiple applications with similar on-demand
scaling requirements to handle periodic spikes at specific application development stages. The
absence of an agile infrastructure was slowing down the application development process, again
negatively impacting company’s competitive advantage.
Why the Legacy ADC was Insufficient
Existing application delivery controllers (ADCs) and load balancing solutions provided little
visibility into the changing application demands and couldn’t automatically scale the application
delivery infrastructure. Scaling required manual provisioning of new devices, a process that was
too slow and complex to meet the dynamic nature of the company’s operations.
1
Top 3 US Retailer Auto-Scales Applications Case Study
Avi Networks Solution
Benefits
The DevOps team first installed Avi Networks Cloud Application
Delivery Platform (CADP) for its pricing application. Avi
Networks CADP is a software application delivery solution with
integration visibility and analytics. It provides high availability,
application security, and application acceleration services. It also
measures application performance and end-user experience, and
automatically scales out the application delivery infrastructure
to maintain the business SLAs. A comprehensive suite of REST
APIs allows seamless integration with their existing orchestration
systems, and offers complete programmability of its operations.
By deploying Avi Networks CADP, the retail organization has
significantly improved its operational efficiency and accelerated
the application development process:
APPLICATION
DELIVERY
APPLICATION
ANALYTICS
• Guaranteed business SLAs by utilizing real-time visibility
into end-user experience and application performance to
dynamically scale server and app delivery infrastructure
• Eliminated static overprovisioning of its server capacity,
reducing the server CapEx by 30% and improving
operational efficiency
• Increased application development efficiency by 25% by
providing a programmable application delivery infrastructure
for dev/test environments
REAL USER
MONITORING (RUM)
AVI UI
REST API
Auto-Scale
Auto Discovery
Auto Placement
vCenter Metrics
VMware
vCenter
AVI CONTROLLER
AVI NETWORKS
CADP
Figure 2: Avi Networks CADP integrates Application Delivery,
Analytics, and Real User Monitoring
Once Avi Networks CADP was installed, the pricing application
performance improved immediately:
• Auto-scaling of application infrastructure and network
services: As the traffic peaked during the pricing update
intervals, Avi Networks CADP automatically scaled out
the load-balancing infrastructure by spinning up new load
balancer VMs (Avi Service Engines or SEs) and server
infrastructure by triggering the creation of new application
VMs through VMware vCloud Director. As the application
traffic reduced, Avi Networks CADP automatically scaled
in the infrastructure, by spinning down the Avi SEs and the
application VMs, returning the capacity back to the free pool.
• Ease of deployment and operations: With Avi Networks’
REST APIs, the entire solution was integrated with
the company’s orchestration system, automating the
deployment of application delivery and analytics capabilities
for new applications and providing real-time visibility into
application performance and end-user experience.
“The auto-scaling feature of Avi Networks CADP solved our
capacity management and application delivery challenges
immediately”, said the Director of Operations at the
retail organization. “With the software-based solution and
programmable REST APIs, we have a complete visibility into
and control over the application performance and the end-user
experience. We have now replicated this success by deploying Avi
Networks CADP for the app development teams and have seen
25% improvement in the development cycle.”
Avi Networks
945 Stewart Drive • Suite 150
Sunnyvale, California 94085
408.628.1300
www.avinetworks.com
vCloud
Director
Auto-Scale Apps
AVI
SERVICE ENGINE
VM
VM
VM
AVI
SERVICE ENGINE
VM
HYPERVISOR
VM
VM
HYPERVISOR
AVI
SERVICE ENGINE
VM
VM
VM
HYPERVISOR
Figure 3: Avi Networks CADP Deployment
Looking Forward
As the next holiday season approaches, the IT team is getting
ready to deploy Avi Networks CADP for some of its other online
e-commerce applications. As the next Black Friday and Cyber
Monday rolls along, Avi Networks CADP will be providing realtime visibility into its customers’ online experience, automatically
scaling out the app delivery infrastructure in response to
increasing demand, and helping maximize the company’s
revenues.
About Avi Networks
Avi Networks is the Cloud Application Delivery Company. The Avi
Networks Cloud Application Delivery Platform (CADP) brings the
benefits of hyperscale application delivery to enterprises at any
scale. With a unique analytics-driven and distributed application
delivery architecture – HYDRA™, the Avi Networks solution
guarantees end-user application experience for on-premise and
cloud-based applications. Please visit us at www.avinetworks.com
or follow us on twitter @avinetworks.
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