FatPipe WARP Helps Internet Business Achieve Always-Up Internet Availability to Customers and Retailers

June 18, 2007; 07:22 AM
The Internet business Shoplocal announced this month that it has attained Internet reliability and redundancy, thanks to FatPipe Networks, (www.fatpipeinc.com) the inventor of router clustering devices for reliable, redundant and high speed Internet WAN connections. Shoplocal is an online shopping and advertising company made up of more than 200 affiliate media, search and shopping sites that provides multi-channel shopping and advertising for consumers and retailers.

Over a six-month period the Internet business endured a total of eight hours downtime due to sporadic ISP failures.

“Our business is conducted over the Internet, so when services go down, we lose a lot of productivity,” said Reggie H., Systems Engineer of Shoplocal, the company seeking dependable high speed Internet. “We have even sent people home a few times because we could not download or upload content to the FTP sites, get email, contracts, or connect to our VPN. We needed high WAN reliability and redundancy for our business and we went with FatPipe.”

The company combined a 100 Mbps connection with a DS3 from two separate ISPs through a FatPipe WARP. It load balances inbound and outbound traffic between the two lines, and provides automatically failover between them should an ISP or component failure occur. In addition to WAN reliability, the company enjoys other benefits, including policy routing, easy administration, and management tools – and, best of all, dependable high speed Internet.

For this Internet business, and many of it other customers, FatPipe gives end users the opportunity to combine dissimilar lines, which saves them money as they are not forced to buy the same speed lines and can lease less expensive connections. “It’s very helpful that I can balance load over the two lines even though they are different speeds,” said Reggie H.

Since the installation of WARP, there had been several situations where one of the ISPs failed or had maintenance issues and WARP did its job flawlessly. “Upper management is more than satisfied with the WARP, and they continue to express relief that business is not halted when one of our lines go down,” said Reggie H.

The Internet business confidently tells its customers that they can offer 99.99998% uptime for their high speed Internet services. Upper management is happy that the company’s productivity is no longer interrupted by WAN connectivity failures.