Context

Advertising is a key component of the Internet ecosystem since a large number of websites would not survive without it. For online service providers the use of an ad serving solution for online advertisement delivery is a must, but it raises concerns for high availability of the ad service and the advertisement load times.

Created in 2001, Smart AdServer develops and sells premium ad serving solutions to manage web, mobile and iPad/tablet display campaigns for media agencies and editors.

Thanks to innovative functionality and optimized quality of service (QoS) Smart AdServer is now serving 350 customers on 1600 sites spread out over four continents.

For an advertising solution provider of this size, high availability (24x7x365) and guaranteed high performance are an essential component of the service delivered to both advertisers and websites operators.

Cedexis usage

In order to live up to their commitments, Smart AdServer’s infrastructure was relying on a CDN (Akamai) for the delivery of the static elements of the advertisement.

But, a few months ago, the technical team at Smart AdServer wanted to add two more CDNs (Cotendo and Level 3). Cedexis helped them measure and understand the real performance of its providers, focusing on the use of relevant data based on the quality of the user’s experience (QoE) that helps to manage and optimize both performance and cost.

Cotendo, Level 3 and Akamai are offering comparable standards of pricing today. Load balancing is therefore controlled thanks to Cedexis Openmix, with a focus on performance.

« Thanks to this approach, Smart AdServer knows that users will always be served by the best CDN, depending on its availability and network connectivity. There are always high variations in performance, and real-time monitoring and routing are remarkably improving the user’s experience », says Smart AdServer’s CEO Cyrille Geffray.

The case of customized dynamic content

In order to deliver dynamic contents, Smart AdServer uses server farms (about 1000 servers) spread out over four geographic zones of the planet.

While the technical teams ensured a redundant architecture, particularly servers and network components, they always imagine the worst, especially a total power failure, a fire or over-heating that could seriously damage a data center.

To be prepared to any worse case scenario, Cedexis Radar was implemented for real-time monitoring of availability, response time, and throughput of all data centers. If any metrics are observed to worsen, traffic requesting dynamic content is automatically switched to data centers with more favorable conditions thanks to Cedexis.

This approach guarantees Smart AdServer a flawless traffic flow counting on the flexibility to choose among multiple data centers.

Results

Using Cedexis is, for Smart AdServer, an important leap forward in achieving stability, availability and performance.

The following graphics illustrate a crash-test, supervised by the configuration teams, aiming to demonstrate that automatic load balancing is working as expected.

« It is today necessary to use Cedexis in order to reach our goals in terms of SLA and performance. As a collateral effect, Cedexis helped us to simplify our 24×7 monitoring watch with a gain of precious milliseconds in the process of delivering advertisements. When we were not using Cedexis, network engineers would have manually load balanced the traffic, with a high risk of errors in a relatively long process, between 10 minutes and 1 hour, » states Laurent Boitard, Network and Infrastructure manager.

Cedexis is now managing load balancing in real time to optimize performance and reliability and our engineers can sleep tight.

Discover Plan for recovery activity in the PDF