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. ©2015 Avi Networks. All rights reserved. Avi Networks, the Avi Networks logo, Distributed Microservices, Inline Analytics, Cloud Application Delivery Platform, and Hyperscale Distributed Resources Architecture are trademarks of Avi Networks in the United States and other countries. All other trademarks, service marks, registered marks, or registered service marks are the property of their respective owners. Avi Networks assumes no responsibility for any inaccuracies in this document. 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