OCC Mundial Drops Downtime

Mexicos OCC Mundial, one of Latin America's busiest job sites, is staying up longer and responding more quickly these days, thanks to some application switches from NetScaler Inc. it deployed in its U.S. data center.

In keeping with the spirit of NAFTA, the firm is using a collocation center in Indianapolis to power its Website. OCC Mundial says it installed two NetScaler 9800HA secure application switches at the U.S. site for load balancing across its servers and protection against dreaded denial-of-service attacks.

About 150,000 people per day visit OCC Mundial, and the company says before it installed the NetScaler switches the Website went down at least once a month for between five and 10 minutes.

“We have not experienced one second of downtime since the switches were installed back on August 10th last year," says Jose Alvarez, president of OCC Mundial. "OCC’s network is also much more resilient. We have been able to handle the numerous virus and hacker attacks in a much simpler and safer manner."

OCC was also looking to save a few pesos by using less bandwidth to deliver its online service -– and it has. Bandwidth used to deliver the site has been cut by 45 percent, Alvarez says.With the competition a mouse-click away, the NetScaler switches also proved their worth by ensuring that the site's response times have improved by 60 to 65 percent.

Specialized switches that speed up and secure data center traffic are becoming a hot commodity. Last year Solucient, a healthcare application service provider, improved its server performance by up to 25 percent by using integrated application switches from NetScaler.

Unlike the Solucient deal, which saw NetScaler replace switches from F5 Networks Inc., OCC Mundial was a first-time deployment for the technology (see NetScaler Helps Solucient Save Servers ). Says Alvarez: “Fortunately, we did not have to replace any products when we purchased the switch –- the results were even better than we were expecting.”

— James Rogers, Site Editor, Next-gen Data Center Forum