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INPS is a leading UK supplier of high quality clinical management
systems with an enviable reputation for excellent customer service. The
company is part of the CEGEDIM Group, which supplies health care
technology and information solutions to over 30,000 GPs, pharmacies and
pharmaceutical manufacturers across Europe.
Cegedim RX
(formerly NDCHealth UK and Enigma Health plc) is now part of Cegedim’s
UK operations. They provide IT systems to over 5,000 pharmacies
throughout the UK supporting pharmacy groups as well as independent
community pharmacists.
The INPS office
in Dundee specialize in the development of hosted, web-based software
applications for large-scale solutions to meet the needs of GP
practices, primary care trusts, acute hospitals and community
organizations.
INPS
strive to deliver innovative clinical systems combined with the highest
levels of training and technical support to our users - a philosophy
which has seen the Vision user base more than quadruple since the
company became part of the Cegedim Group in 1999. This organic growth
has been achieved whilst still maintaining high quality service levels
to our customers.
The Challenge/Problem
In
order to ensure high availability of IT systems to a large number of
pharmacies across the UK INPS previously used a custom round robin DNS
based system to load balance their Microsoft Terminal Server
environment. Due to rapid growth they needed to improve the
performance, availability and reliability of this system. The key
issues for INPS were:
-
Cost Effectiveness
-
Resiliency – Active/Standby pair of load balancers.
-
Maintenance – Easy maintenance of servers in the pool
-
Health Checks – Rapid removal of servers failing to respond
-
Persistence (sticky) – Keeping users on the correct server
-
Performance – Ensure that servers being hit hardest get less traffic
Cost effectiveness
was a key issue so several of the low end load balancers on the market
were tested on try before you buy deals. While these device
specifications clearly matched the requirements when it came to real
environment testing they repeatedly failed to achieve expected results.
Rectifying
these problems was further hampered by having to wait for 3rd line
support from California for both Barracuda and Kemp.
“I
would definitely recommend you to test the Pegasys Clustered Pair for
your Terminal Server environment, and ClusterScale were really helpful
helping us with the system tuning.”
Kepa
The Solution
In
order to ensure high availability of IT systems to a large number of
pharmacies across the UK INPS chose a clustered pair of ClusterLoad
Pegasys units.
"We tested several
load balancer appliances for our Terminal Server Farm including
Barracuda and Kemp Technologies and were disappointed they did not
fully meet our requirements, Specifically replication of session data
between the master and slave load balancer for high availability. We
tested the ClusterLoad Pegasys units and were glad to find it did pass
our tests. As an added benefit the Direct Routing mode enabled us to
remove the requirement for a private load balanced subnet and therefore
a layer of complexity from our architecture."
The
primary benefit of the ClusterScale solution over the likes of
Barracuda and Kemp Technologies was the option to replicate session
data between the master and slave load balancer to ensure high
availability. Furthermore, the complexity of the set-up was easily
reduced as the Direct Routing mode enabled INPS to remove the
requirement for a private load balanced subnet.
“The
implementation of the ClusterScale load balancer was a simple and
surprisingly quick procedure thanks to the easy-to-use web based
interface, in fact we had both units up and running in under 10
minutes.”
“The 24*7 support
offered provides an extremely prompt and intelligent answer to any
queries from a UK based office and the knowledge of 4 hour on-site
response thanks to the use of Dell hardware provides peace of mind.”
“Since
choosing ClusterScale we at INPS have had no performance or reliability
issues resulting in quiet and predictable daily operations, just the
way we like them to be!”
Future:
INPS
recently purchased another pair of ClusterLoad Pegasys units for a new
large scale HTTP based application in development. The product requires
proof testing under extreme load >2GBps. Once the load testing has
been completed INPS will move the ClusterLoad Pegasys units into
production for this product with confidence that the system will easily
match the required performance parameters. |
