As a fast-growing online job search site, SnagAJob.com needs a continuously quick and reliable online presence.After carefully assessing its web optimization strategy, SnagAJob.com decided to make some drastic changes. It moved to a fully virtualized environment and traded its hardware traffic management solution for the Zeus pure software technology.With Zeus’ virtual appliance supporting SnagAJob.com’s new virtual environment, the company was well on its way to meeting its goal of 99.9 per cent uptime.
Richmond Virginia-based SnagAJob.com was growing at double digits, year on year. By 2006, the company boasted more the 20 million members, with big-brand customers like Bed, Bath and Beyond, McDonald’s and 7-Eleven. The company drives nearly all its revenues online through job posts and ads, so even an hour of downtime could cost it thousands of dollars.
SnagAJob.com outgrows its load balancer
With such rapid growth, uptime was more important than ever. SnagAJob.com re-evaluated its web infrastructure, realizing that the hardware traffic manager it had in place to manage its web traffic and server farm couldn’t meet its goal of 99.9 per cent uptime and availability. At the same time, the company decided to move to a virtualized environment, creating its own private Cloud. SnagAJob.com had to find a new solution quickly and one that could match its growth.
Zeus gets snagged
SnagAJob.com first learned about Zeus through VMware’s website and instantly became a fan. “As soon as we found out about Zeus, we quickly fell in love with its technology,” said Matt Reidy, SnagAJob.com’s Director of IT Operations. “The user interface and feature set was so intuitive and easy to navigate, we had the software up and running by ourselves within a couple of hours. “The real selling point for us, however, was that Zeus offers its product as a VMware virtual appliance, so it could easily be integrated into our virtualized environment. That really drove us to Zeus.”
Delivering 99.9 per cent uptime
Today, SnagAJob.com is running five instances of Zeus software with two clusters of Zeus Traffic Manager and a single license for quality assurance and development. Reidy continues, “The greatest benefit Zeus gives us is the amount of availability it enables for our members and customers. If a server or service is unavailable, Zeus knows about it and will divert traffic seamlessly. “With all the built-in health checks, both on the web and application side, we have the ability to self-heal. We can gauge the number of connections to the websites at any time and see how they are performing.
If we need to make changes to one server, we can use the automated programming interface (API) to drain the node and then bring it back into the pool. We couldn’t do that with our previous hardware solution.”
Benefits of a virtual appliance in a virtualized environment
As a pure-software solution, Zeus plays a critical role in SnagAJob.com’s virtualized infrastructure.When the website experiences an influx of traffic, SnagAJob.com can easily burst into their private Cloud at a moment’s notice, at no additional cost. Zeus enables SnagAJob.com to absorb and evenly distribute those spikes in traffic, and gives the flexibility
to scale on-demand, utilizing more web servers as needed. “If we have 20 servers and need 100, we can easily spin them up,” said Reidy. “If we still had a Physical environment, we couldn’t do that as easily and would take days rather than minutes. Speed to change was a big motivation to moving to a virtualized platform and Zeus is an essential part of that.”
Looking to the future with Zeus
SnagAJob.com has been so pleased with Zeus software that it sees Zeus Multi-Site Manager, a key component of Zeus Elastic Application Delivery platform, playing an important role. Reidy concludes, “While we only have one datacenter now, we’re likely to build out a new one in the near future. We are considering integrating Zeus Multi- Site Manager which will enable us to manage various instances of Zeus across our datacenters from one location, giving us a tremendous business advantage.”
SnagAJob.com at a glance
SnagAJob.com, America’s largest hourly job website, has helped connect hourly workers with quality full-time and part-time jobs in a wide range of industries since 2000. Headquartered in Richmond, Va., current clients include DISH Network®, Verizon Wireless®, FedEx®, Boston Market®, Chick-fil-A®, Bed Bath & Beyond®, Michaels® and Jiffy Lube®. Learn more about the No. 1 source for hourly employment at SnagAJob.com.
Zeus at a glance
Zeus software enables our customers to create, manage and deliver exceptional online services in Physical, Virtual and Cloud environments. Implementing a Zeus solution allows organizations to visualize and manipulate the flow of traffic to their web-enabled applications, ensuring a consistently robust web infrastructure. Zeus powers over one million website infrastructures across the world including, the BBC, BT, Domino’s Pizza, Gilt Groupe, ITV, I Want One of Those, Play.com, See Tickets, STA Travel, Virgin Media, WhitePages and Zoosk.
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