Service Provider Now IT Solutions raises application experience for business customers

Now IT powers higher performance for Australian businesses

Australian IT specialist Now IT Solutions, which offers a single point of call for all business technology needs, faced a problem when its load balancer was unable to share information with Amazon Web Service’s relational database, or access Microsoft Exchange. The situation placed restraints on Now IT’s ability to service major customers. The company had been using Microsoft’s network load balancing solution, and other Linux-based load balancers. Ultimately their CTO, Stephen Tonna, and his team resolved the issues by prioritising the customer experience with Kemp.

Now IT operates predominantly across Australia’s east coast. The company has 45 technical people among a staff of 60. Customers range from small to medium commercial businesses to multi-site corporate networks. Now IT solutions incorporate cutting edge technology, utilising equipment from some of the best hardware manufacturers, backed by first grade warranty and support packages.

IT support packages include remote management and support, voice and data network solutions, server / workstation hardware and related accessories, retail point-of-sale solutions, office printing solutions and in-house graphic artist and web design. The company’s infrastructure includes four internally run data centres at different locations, each running client systems. Now IT also leverages public cloud hosting as needed.

The Kemp Solution

“Since our previous load balancer was unable to support key aspects of our infrastructure, we looked around for alternatives”, said Stephen Tonna. “After a careful evaluation, we chose Kemp for its ease of use and its support for application templates.”

Implementation was straightforward. Initially Stephen’s team set up the virtual services on individual virtual machines, one data centre at a time.

“Then these were migrated to high availability pairs, which was relatively quick and easy,” said Stephen. The Kemp load balancers handle more than 4,000 users, generating about 1.3TB of email each month, representing more than three million-plus emails sent and received. Other applications supported include remote desktop services including gateways and brokers, with over 3,500 users’ connections.

The End Result

Stephen Tonna says the benefits and improvements resulting from implementing Kemp load balancers have been far reaching.

“Further, Kemp gear allows us to scale up client access to our data centre resources and applications, as well as improving redundancy and high availability.”

For the future, as Now IT expands, the tech team will integrate the company’s own data centres and infrastructure with public cloud infrastructures. They will use Kemp to provide load balancing services for email and remote desktop services across multiple data centres and cloud hosting providers.

Stephen Tonna concludes: “Any systems we install need to be of a high availability design with no single points of failure. Where load balancing is required Kemp is our preferred option.”