Interactive Resorts

As the UK's fastest growing catered ski holiday agency, Interactive Resorts are on track to sell more than 25,000 ski holidays in 2007 lone. Interactive Resorts operate a number of major ski-holiday web sites year-round and conduct their business operations exclusively on-line. The company's sales consultants are located in London, but the administrative offices for the company are located 300 miles away in the Lake District. Remote administration capabilities are essential for Jonathan James, the Technical Manager of Interactive Resorts. It's an understatement to say that Interactive Resorts must have a completely reliable Internet connection.

Business Challenge

Reliability, diversity, growth potential, cost and remote administration were the five major challenges facing Jonathan James. Confronted with the reality that the business was severely affected when its Internet connection failed, he knew he needed more reliability. Having multiple Internet service providers was one way to achieve that reliability, but the administrative cost of adding more data circuits was quickly adding up. In addition, doubling or tripling the connection to a major provider would not solve the problem of downtime.

Yet, Interactive Resorts was clearly a growing business - one that relied heavily on its Internet connection. To keep potential holiday-makers happy and to provide the best service possible, he needed to increase the reliability and size of the Internet connection. A larger connection would accommodate the volume of buyers interested in purchasing ski holidays at one of over 100 resorts in 20 countries. James initially opted for service from two different providers, but that solution had its own drawbacks.

With two providers, James had a cold-swap back-up solution. When the main connection was down, someone in the London office had to manually swap Interactive Resorts to its other provider. While it worked, that solution was impractical. "It would be nice to use both connections at the same time," reasoned James. "We would not have to worry about making a physical switch to a backup connection."

Diversity alone, without reliability, growth potential, cost reduction and remote administration capabilities, was not getting Interactive Resorts the reliability that James knew it needed. James knew he needed something better, so he went looking. What he found was the Xrio.

The Solution

James settled on the Xrio Load Balancer. While still using just two broadband connections, James was able to move Interactive Resorts' connection to one highly capable, affordable ADSL2+ line, which provides up to 24 Mbps inbound traffic and 2.5 Mbps outbound traffic. James opted to keep a second standard ADSL connection to a different provider, which offers 8 Mbps inbound traffic and 512K outbound traffic. While the two connections are independent, the load balancing is handled by the load balancer, so Interactive Resorts could now use both broadband connections simultaneously, without having to do any physical swapping. The inbound customer traffic is on the ADSL2+ connection, while the office traffic is on the ADSL connection. This segregation of traffic is helpful because each incoming line backs up the other. If the main connection is down, the Interactive Resorts sales team is unaffected because clients can still reach them through the backup connection.

The Xrio Load Balancer provides Interactive Resorts with a full package: reliability, diversity, growth potential, cost reduction and remote administration. According to James, "The Xrio Load Balancer does exactly what it is supposed to do. If one connection goes down, the traffic is automatically switched over to the other line, and when both are up it uses both effectively. I have pulled the plug to our main connection - literally – and the Internet connection hasn't gone down. I've had no problems."

The Results

"The basic set-up for the load balancer is fairly straightforward," says James. "I was pleasantly surprised. I made a couple of calls to technical support but the set-up was very straight forward. I had the whole thing set up in 30 minutes. It was that quick," James reports.

"I would definitely recommend UBM. For Interactive Resorts, reliability is essential. The Xrio Load Balancer is very important to our operations. We haven't had any problems," says James.

Our main reason for getting the Xrio Load Balancer was to ensure the reliability of our broadband connections. With Xrio Load Balancers , we will have problems only if both connections go down at the same time. There are other aspects of Xrio Load Balancer that are attractive. Being able to direct certain traffic down one connection wasn't the primary reason we got it, but it certainly proved useful afterwards," James says.

I was very impressed with the Xrio Load Balancer. It worked the first time I turned it on, and it's still working."