U.S. R&D Organization Ensures MobileIron Availability and Streamlines its Performance with Kemp ADCs

A U.S. based organization operating in the R&D industry with 500 employees across four locations required a high performance and intelligent virtual load balancing solution to provide high availability, reliability and optimized performance for their Enterprise Mobility Management Platform.

Challenge

The R&D Organization needed to satisfy the growing mobile demand of its workforce and chose to deploy MobileIron an Enterprise Mobility Management Platform. MobileIron is designed to simplify and secure the management of both corporate issued and personal devices, a key component of the platform is MobileIron Sentry, an in-line gateway that manages, encrypts and secures traffic between the mobile device and back-end enterprise systems.

MobileIron Sentry interacts with a company’s ActiveSync server to allow employees access a range of business productivity applications from their mobile devices. The R&D organization identified the need for an intelligent load balancing solution to provide a layer of high availability for their MobileIron Sentry servers helping to provide full availability of ActiveSync, ensuring maximum uptime and no adverse impact on mobile access to critical business continuity applications.

With in-house IT resources already stretched to manage ongoing projects, the R&D Organization required a vendor that could offer an intelligent load balancing solution combined with access to a professional services team who could readily supply the expertise for a rapid and quality assured deployment.

Solution

The R&D Organization evaluated several leading ADC Vendors and ultimately chose Kemp's VLM-2000 citing Kemp as providing the best product and service value. What particularly stood out for their Systems Administrators in the evaluation process was the ability to avail of Kemp's no obligation free trial.

"The ease of deploying a trial system with a trial license was something that stood out for us. This way, we could test and validate most of the configuration that’s necessary for MobileIron before diving all in and making the full purchase. Most of the infrastructure was stood up before the actual licensing was even purchased," said a System Administrator who worked on the deployment. By selecting the VLM-2000, the R&D organization was able to avail of its 2Gbps processing throughput and specially optimized software able to accomplish Layer 7 content switching, software based traffic acceleration and IPS. These features allowed the seamless distribution of client traffic across multiple MobileIron servers, providing scalability, fast end-user responsiveness and reduced MobileIron Sentry CPU utilization.

“The VLM-2000 provides a resource optimization layer in front of applications so that IT administrators gain greater control to adapt to dynamic changes in their application infrastructure,” said Rob Duggan, Business Development Manager, Kemp Professional Services. The administration flexibility and ease of use provided by the VLM-2000 was a sentiment echoed by the R&D organization.

Implementation

With ongoing projects running simultaneously, the R&D organization did not have the required time and resources available to handle the VLM deployments solely in-house. To accelerate the deployment time and reduce costs, they took advantage of Kemp’s Express Professional Services package giving them access to Kemp’s industry leading trained application deployment experts.

Within 24 hours of requesting an engagement with Professional Services, a Kemp engineer arranged a pre-configuration call to plan for the deployment and agree on a statement of work with the R&D organization to ensure a rapid, smooth and quality assured configuration. This approach allowed the R&D organization to save a significant amount of time in the critical bring up phase of the deployment.

During the configuration process, the Kemp Professional Services team provided guidance and best practice on the optimum Load Balancing configuration for their MobileIron environment plus networking and hypervisor best practices, working with the vendor MobileIron and the R&D organization to address any application specific challenges with the MobileIron integration.

"Kemp's Professional Services Team were very knowledgeable in multiple areas of expertise, from the actual Kemp configuration to networking and hypervisor best practices," said a System Administrator who worked on the deployment.

The entire professional services engagement from the initial scoping of the configuration to the deployment and training was completed within 12 working days. The R&D Organization were particularly impressed with Kemp's level of engagement and responsiveness throughout the implementation process.

Results

Since the installation of the Kemp VLMs, the R&D organization has been able to optimize its MobileIron environment and guarantee availability for its growing user base. With the MobileIron Sentries installed behind the Kemp VLMs, a robust layer of high availability has been created to ensure maximum uptime and a seamless user experience across mobile for its user base.

The R&D organization where able to overcome their lack of time and resources to achieve a cost effective, simplified and accelerated deployment with the expert guidance of Kemp’s Professional Services team. Bringing the experience of over 40,000 customer deployments, Kemp’s team of Engineers where able to provide best practice guidance on all areas of the deployment and provided the R&D’s IT team with in depth knowledge and training so they could manage their Kemp VLMs with ease and confidence going forward.