NEW ORLEANS, LA — (Marketwire) — 07/10/12 — , a leading provider of enterprise-class application delivery, load balancing and acceleration solutions, today announced that its line of Application Delivery Controllers (ADCs) now enables educational institutions to deliver the Blackboard Learn platform securely and at wire speed. Using an Equalizer ADC or load balancer to front end Blackboard Learn application servers eliminates processing burden that SSL encryption/decryption tasks place on servers, delivering a 7x performance advantage over non-offloaded servers and ensuring non-stop availability of Blackboard Learn applications.
As educational institutions go online to meet the ever-increasing demands for distance learning and user-intensive online course loads, the encryption/decryption burden of delivering applications securely via HTTPS and Secure Socket Layer (SSL) can cause significant degradation of server performance. A Signature Blackboard Partner in the Blackboard Partnerships program, Coyote Point Systems was an original beta tester of Service Pack 8 for Blackboard Learn 9.1 that now supports Layer 7 SSL offloading and eliminates the performance hit enabling applications to be delivered seamlessly at wire speed.
“Web applications in education are very sophisticated, and the servers and networks that support them have become mission critical,” said Coyote Point CEO and “Alpha Coyote” Bill Kish. “Coyote Point-s Equalizer ADCs can now offload the significant amount of SSL processing generated by Blackboard Learn users and application servers to ensure that applications are delivered securely with no impact on speed or performance — a win-win for students, faculty and IT administrators.”
Capable of processing up to 14,000 HTTPS/SSL transactions per second, Coyote Point-s top-of-the-line Equalizer E650GX offloads CPU-intensive cryptographic operations and frees up servers to handle delivery of web application content. The Coyote Point solution has enterprise-grade scalability and offers direct integration with VMware for universities running Blackboard Learn in virtual server environments.
“Performance is literally business critical to our university,” said Michael Getz, Director of Technology for the , one of Canada-s top five business schools with over 2,500 students enrolled in a variety of undergraduate and graduate programs. “We went virtual back in 2010, transitioning from two servers running Blackboard Learn to three Coyote Point Equalizer E450GX ADCs across three VMware ESXI servers. But SSL encryption/decryption is so CPU-intensive, we were still having slow-downs. With the new SP8 service pack, we can now take full advantage of the Equalizer functionality and securely deliver Blackboard Learn applications 7x faster than before.”
At Auburn University at Montgomery (AUM) in Alabama, demand for online courses has increased rapidly among the student body of 5,000 undergrad and graduate students. “We deployed Coyote Point ADCs in our VMware infrastructure when we virtualized in 2010, but were having problems with SSL offload,” said Carl Simpson, institutional support specialist for IT Services at AUM. “The partnership between Blackboard and Coyote Point has been a great experience, since we got support from both ends to solve the problem. Now our network runs fast and secure, 24-7.”
Coyote Point Systems will be exhibiting at BbWorld® 2012, Blackboard-s premier education technology conference, in New Orleans Louisiana, July 10-12, in booth #306. For more information on Blackboard World visit
Coyote Point Systems Inc. is a leader in application delivery, acceleration and load balancing solutions that enable IT personnel to have greater control over their web and application servers. Coyote Point-s Equalizer, Equalizer OnDemand, Envoy and VLB products provide the industry-s foremost combination of performance, affordability and ease of use offering 24/7 server high-availability, optimized server performance, flexible scalability and secure application and network access. For more information, go to , or call us at 1-877-367-2696.
Contact:
Zee Zaballos
ZNA Communications
831-425-1581 x201
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