Kemp Load Balancing Eliminates Costly Downtime for Accentf(x) Client Web Services

Accentf(x), a performance marketing and customer data analytics company based in Louisville, Kentucky, with 32 employees, required a load balancing solution to eliminate periods of costly downtime during scheduled updates to client web services.

Challenge:

Accentf(x) prides itself on the ability to guide its clients in maximizing the value of their B2C customer data and insights. A strategy which has proven to be very successful, generating more than $15 million top line revenue and counting several Fortune 500 companies on their books such as GE, Samsung, Home Depot and Best Buy.

With over a decade of experience as a team in utilizing data analytics and modeling to maximize the return on clients’ marketing spend, Accentf(x) was only too aware of the need to continuously seek opportunities to improve and tweak processes across many facets of a business to achieve continued growth. Using this methodology, the IT team members at Accentf(x) identified the need to improve the efficiency of how they conducted critical updates on key APIs and web services which were essential to achieving successful outcomes for clients.

Wanting to achieve greater efficiency in system update processes without comprising uptime to clients, the team began to seek an intelligent load balancing solution to meet this specific challenge.

Solution:

Prior to 2013, Accent(f)x was part of the larger Accent Marketing Group which was running its infrastructure at Peak 10, a hybrid IT infrastructure provider. Following its separation from the group into its own entity, Accent(f)x maintained the long-standing partnership with Peak 10, hosting its web services in Peak 10’s hosted private cloud environment.

As Peak 10 was a Kemp Partner and had in-depth experience deploying Kemp solutions, it recommended Kemp as the optimum solution for Accentf(x)'s particular challenges.

Peak 10 could provide key insights into the functionality a Kemp Virtual LoadMaster, which was of great benefit to the Accentf(x) team having only worked with basic layer 4 load balancing solutions in the past.

Based on the positive recommendation from Peak 10, Accentf(x) chose Kemp and opted for the VLM-2000 providing up to 2000 Mbps throughput and specially optimized software able to accomplish layer 7 content switching, software-based traffic acceleration, and IPS.

Results:

Since installing Kemp in 2013, a high degree of reliability and a very positive return on investment has been achieved. Accentf(x) has been able to achieve measurable efficiencies in how it conducts client web services updates, eliminating downtime and the need to perform updates outside of core business hours. Furthermore, Kemp’s informative dashboards helped identify a failure in one of its web servers, thus supplying Accentf(x) with a diagnostic and detection solution.

Accentf(x) has also found its Kemp solution incredibly easy to use. The intuitive design of the Kemp web user interface has allowed their IT team to easily administrate from the Kemp VLM with no prior training.