Pacific Sunwear selected the NetScaler device because it offered better compression and was more efficient and easier to use than the other boxes, says Russell. He says the NetScaler box proved to be approximately 25 percent more efficient than the others Pacific Sunwear had tested. (The company actually bought two NetScaler 9800 HAs, one as a redundant/ failover unit.)
In operation, the NetScaler 9800 "goes in between our servers and routers and captures outgoing HTTP requests and compresses them, so it reduces bandwidth requirements," says Russell. The oversubscribed T3 line that was running at 13Mbits/sec before the NetScaler boxes were deployed now uses only 6Mbits/sec. "It's cut bandwidth literally in half," he says.
Russell, along with Jim Dorris, Pacific Sunwear's enterprise communications architect, configured the NetScaler devices to ensure that responses to incoming traffic were returned via the same router that the original request came in on, thus balancing traffic.
Just as importantly, Russell adds, the devices compress objects requested from the server via the open-source data compression protocol, gzip, which is supported by all HTTP 1.1-compatible browsers. This reduces page download sizes. As a result, a page that would have taken 10 seconds to load on a 28.8Kbit/sec dial-up session now loads in five seconds. "That means a world of difference to dial-up visitors," says Russell.
The NetScaler 9800 offers three primary optimization capabilities, notes NetScaler Product Marketing Manager Anthony James. In addition to load balancing and compressing outgoing content, it also offers content caching and TCP offload/buffering.
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