SageWorks replaces F5 Big-IP: Customer response sees a 24% improvement in speed and responsiveness

January 23, 2017 - Heavily relied on by major financial industry organizations, including one fifth of the USA's banks, the Sageworks data center serves responses for nearly four million requests a day. To meet the needs of its customers, the SaaS company needs its systems to remain responsive and available, without fail. As such, load balancing technology for their very active on-premises data center is critical.

But the company was experiencing support challenges with its incumbent F5 Big-IP ADC and the product's user interface was complex and difficult to navigate. This drove Sageworks to look for a new solution.

Tom Hearn, Senior Technology Manager at SageWorks, spoke highly of the transition:

"I had experience load balancing Exchange and SharePoint environments using KEMP solutions with great success. In fact, the KEMP support experience was the best I've ever had. The product knowledge of the team is phenomenal and their user interface is significantly easier to follow than F5."

The main benefits included a significantly easier to use GUI, much greater security, and higher quality of service. With features including SNIB certificates and SSL offloading reducing overall maintenance time, patching time for the new devices has been reduced to approximately 20 minutes for both devices - six times faster than before.

While the original Virtual LoadMaster implementation for the test/dev environment was completed in just 45 minutes, two additional physical LoadMaster units, for the data center's active / passive clusters were deployed in just three hours.