When security means everyday reliability

Security of cloud services comes in more forms than fighting off hackers and malware attacks. Sometimes security issues cover wider, more mundane aspects of service provision, such as ensuring that the service is there, reliably, ready to be used as and when required.

For example, Array Networks’ APV10650 Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) are being used by eClinicalWorks to consolidate its cloud-hosted application infrastructure to meet demands of its growing SaaS business.

 “We considered several other application delivery controller vendors and found that Array exceeded our performance requirements and provided more than 90% of the application delivery functionality we needed at almost half the price of the market leading competitor. Array provided the optimal balance of sound technology and cost-efficiency.”

eClinicalWorks (eCW) operates in the ambulatory clinical systems market, and its cloud-hosted solution enables physicians and other medical personnel to access patient records from anywhere.

The company deployed Array’s APV10650 appliances to scale SaaS offerings and accommodate growth while maintaining a secure, reliable and low-latency experience for its healthcare provider customers. eCW has been consolidating infrastructure into a smaller number of larger datacentres to reduce overhead, simplify management and take advantage of economies of scale in response to recent growth.

The APV10650 appliances allow eCW to ensure that applications remain available 24/7, that individual servers are not overloaded, and if a server goes offline, traffic is rerouted to another available server. The APV load balances servers, offloads SSL secure transaction processing and supports of all of eCW’s SaaS offerings, including electronic medical records (EMR), practice management (PM), revenue cycle management (RCM), electronic health exchange (EHX), patient portals, mobile access and others.

By placing Array APV10650 application delivery controllers in front of physical application servers, terminal servers and data base servers, eCW has achieved a level of redundancy that ensures its SaaS offerings will remain up and running in the event of hardware failure in the datacentre.

In addition, providing redundancy at the logical level for each customer ensures that each customer has high availability for their specific services and is not impacted by issues that may occur with other services within eCW’s points of delivery.

“Array’s APV10650 appliance delivered the scalability needed to accommodate our growing business,” said Matt Lewis, CIO of eClinicalWorks. “We considered several other application delivery controller vendors and found that Array exceeded our performance requirements and provided more than 90 percent of the application delivery functionality we needed at almost half the price of the market leading competitor. Array provided the optimal balance of sound technology and cost-efficiency.”

Paul Andersen, director of marketing at Array Networks, sees the deployment of Array’s new APV10650 appliances as a testament to the success of eCW’s initial installment of the APV application delivery controllers six years ago.

“Our APV10650 appliance has been able to deliver the functionality, performance and scalability eCW needed for its mega data centers while also maximizing the company’s ROI,” he said.

The Array APV10650 application delivery appliances support up to 120Gbps of throughput and up to 280K SSL transactions per second. In addition to providing server load balancing, link load balancing and global server load balancing, the appliances support SSL acceleration, connection multiplexing, TCP offload, caching, compression, traffic shaping, application scripting and custom routing, IPv6, multi-layer security with Web application firewall and APIs for integration with cloud management infrastructure.