Unified Government of Kansas City uses Kemp's Professional Services team to deploy SharePoint Load Balancing for smoother UX

A lack of in-house expertise with load balancing technology led the Unified Government of Wyandotte County and Kansas City to seek a partner who could ensure a best practice installation of load balancers in their SharePoint environment to increase responsiveness with a full skills handover upon project completion.

Challenge

The Unified Government's Department of Technical Services (DOTS) is responsible for coordinating the use of information technology across the various departments and agencies of Unified Government to ensure that accurate and timely information is provided to citizens, elected officials, management, and staff.

The Unified Government of Wyandotte County and Kansas City’s SharePoint environment is a critical application in achieving its SLA, allowing over 1,400 staff to collaborate, store and easily access documentation and productivity tools, which is key to the Unified Government’s ability to effectively serve its citizens.

With increasing demands being placed on their SharePoint environment and users experiencing slower response times, the DOTS knew it was time to seek a Load Balancing solution to provide a faster response time and improve the user experience.

Due to lack of in-house expertise with load balancing technology and limited resources, a critical requirement of the DOTS was to find a vendor that could provide a great product combined with the in-house expertise to guide them through the configuration process ensuring a quality assured and smooth deployment was achieved.

Solution

The DOTS evaluated products from the best-known application delivery networking vendors and selected Kemp to achieve their objectives based on Kemp's superior combination of functionality, scalability and service value.

The DOTS chose Kemp's LM-4000 hardware load balancing solution, delivering 8 Gbps L7 throughput and 2500 SSL transactions per second (TPS), an essential enabler for resilient delivery of application workloads in medium and large-scale enterprises. Beyond the functionality offered by Kemp’s LM-4000, a key factor in the decision to choose Kemp was the added value that could be provided by Kemp’s Professional Services team during the configuration process.

The DOTS learned how the Professional Services team could take care of evaluating, planning, designing and implementing their required application delivery environment in SharePoint, ultimately leading to a faster and quality assured deployment plus a reduced TCO.

Commenting on the value that Kemp’s Professional Services team can provide to customers, Derek Kiely, Director of Global Support and Services at Kemp said,

Implementation

Upon receiving the request for a professional services engagement, a Kemp Engineer set up a call with the DOTS team to define the scope of the project and subsequently provided a statement of work outlining the best practice steps to achieve a quality assured and issue free deployment.

Specifically, the Kemp Engineer provided in-depth technical guidance on how to take advantage of the Kemp LoadMaster’s data compression and content caching capabilities to reduce the number of requests that had to be directed to pool servers for static content, reducing bandwidth utilization and improving the response time of their SharePoint environment.

After the successful configuration and deployment of a pair of LM-4000s in their SharePoint environment, the DOTS received training and knowledge transfer from Kemp’s Professional Services team to ensure they could administer and maintain the LoadMaster with ease and confidence going forward.

Results

The Unified Government of Wyandotte County and Kansas City was able to successfully overcome the lack of in-house expertise with load balancing technology by partnering with Kemp’s Professional Services team. In doing so, they have been able to streamline the performance of their SharePoint environment by deploying Kemp’s LM-4000 combined with the expert configuration guidance supplied by Kemp Engineers.

As a testament to the value provided by Kemp’s Professional Services team, the Unified Government of Wyandotte County and Kansas City has begun to re-engage with the Professional Services team to provide configuration assistance for the addition of further site collections to their SharePoint environment in the near future.