RSPB

Founded in 1889, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds is one of the United Kingdom's most well known wildlife and environmental charities. The RSPB has a UK headquarters, three national offices, nine regional offices, and 2 00 nature reserves, as well as a local network of more than 175 local groups. Its membership numbers more than one million, with 13,000 volunteers and 1,800 regular staff.

Business Challenge

The RSPB's Wide Area Network serves all of the Society's offices and reserves, and a single Internet connection located at its headquarters in Sandy provides consistent monitoring and security for all users. The RSPB had relied on a single 2 MB leased line, but as the Society has grown, this connection frequently became saturated with Web traffic, to the point of disrupting critical Internet services.

"Web browsing, whether for business or personal use, had become so slow that at times it had become unusable, and essential business traffic such as email was being delayed," said Lloyd Adams, IT manager for the RSPB. The Society investigated the cost of doubling the capacity of its leased connection, but the cost of that upgrade was difficult to justify.

To compound the problem, when the Society's main connection was down, all of the regional and national offices lost connectivity to the Internet as well. With so many regular network users, the Society not only needed more bandwidth but also needed to find an affordable solution that would provide some measure of resiliency.

Adams began researching potential solutions on the Internet and discovered load balancers by Xrio. "This was the only unit I could find that met our requirements at a reasonable cost," said Adams. "Xrio were very supportive of us and provided us with a trial unit."

The RSPB would also need assistance with the installation and configuration of any solution they applied. Once again, Xrio responded to the RSPB's needs. "We were not prepared to do too much learning and testing on our live systems, so we had a configuration built for use by Xrio. It was then a simple matter of loading the configuration and inserting the unit in-line between our firewall and our router out of hours, and then testing it," said Adams.

The Solution

Since the RSPB had been working under very challenging IT conditions, network availability was of prime importance. The installation and cut-over would be critical, because the RSPB did not want to tamper with the operation of its live systems.

According to Adams, "The two big selling points for us are the expandability and the fact that we could install the unit in transparent mode. Transparent mode meant that we did not have to make any changes to our existing configuration, and that if we ran into problems we could simply remove the unit. We did not have any problems so we did not need to do this."

Expandability was also a key requirement for the RSPB, which had initially found the cost of upgrading on leased lines to be too high. The UBM not only provided the bandwidth and resiliency the RSPB needed, but also offered cost control well into the future. "The Xrio Load Balancers will also enable us to add more ADSL - or leased line - connections as our needs increase or our business changes."

As a result of the trial, the RSPB has deployed one of Xrio's most capable and expandable load balancer. UBM allows the RSPB to keep its 2 MB leased line, and supplement it with an ADSL line that provides an additional 5 MB of download and 700KB of upload capacity.

The network connection was re-designed to route all of the HTTP and HTTPS traffic on the ADSL line, leaving the leased line to serve the other protocols. Xrio Load Balancers also provided the RSPB with the resiliency it was looking for. If the ADSL line is lost, the leased line takes up the Web traffic again.

The Results

After deploying the Xrio Load Balancer, the RSPB network is working again in the effort to protect the UK's endangered wildlife and environment. "The impact was immediate," recalled Adams. "The Internet is now usable again. We have regained the performance we need at a much reduced cost over increasing our leased connection."

The RSPB also enjoys the benefits of a combined ADSL and leased line solution, including a significantly reduced cost and increased resiliency. Thanks to a bit of professional assistance with the configuration, the deployment of Xrio Load Balancers were seamless.