Zeus Technology-GreatSchools

Vendor: Zeus Technology

Customer: GreatSchools www.greatschools.net 
Vertical Markets: Non-profit organization
State: California

Technology Used: Three x86 boxes running FreeBSD 6, two incumbent network switches, three ZXTM servers

Solution: GreatSchools was founded by a former teacher in 1998. An independent non-profit organization, GreatSchools helps parents choose the best schools for their children and encourages them to get more involved in their children’s education. The organization's site, GreatSchools.net, received more than 25 million visits in 2005.

As traffic to the organization's site continued to grow, GreatSchools had to deal with rising bandwidth costs. They began searching for a way to better handle their bandwidth usage, but wanted a solution that would run on top of their current operating system and wouldn’t require additional hardware, rack space, or power.

After considering several options, GreatSchools obtained a free ZXTM evaluation license. Impressed with the performance, they decided to implement Zeus Technology’s ZXTM on a long-term basis. Currently, the company’s Web traffic is distributed in a round robin fashion to three redundant ZXTM servers via two incumbent network switches. The ZXTM servers compress content and cache frequently requested content to accelerate the delivery of information. 

ZXTM has been able to handle the site's current traffic levels and make more efficient use of existing IT resources, thereby saving the organization money. In addition, the content compression capabilities of ZXTM have reduced bandwidth usage by between 30 and 40 percent, which translates into a cost savings of thousands of dollars each year. ZXTM has also allowed GreatSchools to meet the demands associated with increased site traffic without purchasing new application servers and rack space. As a result, the organization has been able to continue using its existing data center. Without ZXTM, GreatSchools would have been faced with the costly challenge of trying to locate a bigger space and possibly a different data center. 

Further details: http://www.zeus.com/documents/en/Gr/GreatSchools_CS_09.pdf