Case Studies

	crocus.co.uk case study (pdf) 345kb
	crocus.co.uk case study (web)

	INPS case study (web)

	Mymovies case study (web)

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Case study - Crocus.co.uk

Crocus.co.uk Solves reliability and performance issues of its ecommerce web site with new ClusterScale appliances.

Online retailing is a cut-throat business where customer loyalty is by no means assured, a single failure of the web site can have serious financial impact with lost sales and generate negative publicity.

Since it launched in April 2000 Crocus grew its customer base exponentially. After the dust settled on the dot com boom Crocus was the only online gardening site in the UK to thrive and survive.

The original single Windows web sever and database were quickly swamped by the growth in traffic and a CISCO 416 local-redirector was recommended and installed by the ISP. The new 4 server cluster sufficed for another year but when the IT Manager Gary Besta investigated the traffic projections it became obvious that the CISCO unit would not be able to cope with the load.

A short list of requirements were drawn up:

The new load balancer would need to handle up to 1 million customers a day.
Half of these customers would be in long SSL based shopping sessions.
The solution needed to be a high availability clustered pair.
The solution need to be easy to configure
Traffic analysis functionality was required
24*7 Technical Support was mandatory

The CISCO CSS and F5 solutions were the obvious ones at the time, but when ClusterScale contacted Crocus.co.uk and offered them a demonstration unit they were hooked.

"The fact that we had the two ClusterLoad appliances up and running as a high-availability pair in 10mins had me hooked. The down to earth and efficient Technical Support staff were the icing on the cake. Oh .. and I saved £20,000 from the allocated budget...".. Gary Besta – IT Manager.

Over the last few years we have purchased another 6 ClusterScale appliances:

2 for our acquisition of GoneGardening.com
2 for our Back office & Terminal Server environment
& 2 As Hot Spares and development environment testing

"The whole of spring is really busy for plants and we get big seasonal spikes in traffic, especially Valentines day, Mothers day and Christmas. This used to be a nightmare for server performance but we can add our back up servers and even development servers to the cluster in seconds to vastly increase our capacity and customer response time.", Gary Besta – IT Manager.

Planning for Future Growth

All of the user sessions were stored on a single Oracle server and Gary was aware of the risk in having a single point of failure. Gary was approached again by ClusterScale while he was in the process of specifying an upgrade to a shared storage Oracle cluster.

ClusterScale suggested that Crocus become a reference customer for their new ClusterMirror product. The ClusterMirror product is an easy plug and play appliance that mirrors the core Oracle database to an exact hardware copy using commodity Gigabit network technology. ClusterScale also offer 24*7 support and Global onsite hardware maintenance, for the ClusterMirror solution which enables worry free operation of the mission critical database cluster.

We are working in partnership with Loadbalancer.org and ClusterScale Ltd to design a shared nothing MySQL Cluster this is intended to give us unlimited saleability for the web site over the next 10 years.

Crocus.co.uk at glance:

Since it launched in April 2000 Crocus has become the largest e-commerce supplier of plants, garden equipment and cut flowers.

No other company in the UK can offer such a comprehensive range of plants, trees and shrubs, with a choice of over 3500 varieties. The offering has proved successful with both the public and trade customers.

In the past 7 years Crocus has built 7 Gold medal winning gardens at Chelsea.

ClusterScale at a glance:

ClusterScale are a UK based company specializing in both Load Balancing & Data Base Clustering appliances.

ClusterScale enables you to cost effectively and rapidly increase the availability & scalability of your core business applications and systems. Enabling you to make sound strategic investments in your infrastructure, with guaranteed RoI.

ClusterScale can help you design your infrastructure to be truly scalable by providing solid appliance style solutions that you can then build and expand on. ClusterScale are committed to open source platforms that avoid locking customers into proprietary systems.