Outfits that sell tickets online know all about traffic spikes. Thousands of fans and ticket brokers wait to pounce the minute that tickets go on sale for their favorite music, sports and entertainment events. If a Web site can't handle the load, revenue (not to mention customer service) takes a hit.

To keep sales humming even during traffic spikes, Musictoday deployed load balancing gear from Coyote Point Systems earlier this year. The e-commerce company - which is a subsidiary of concert producer Live Nation - first deployed one of Coyote Point’s Equalizer E550si load balancing and acceleration appliances and tried it out during a few big ticket releases.

“Our site performance improved, our page downloads were faster, and there was no longer a bottleneck. So we went ahead and purchased three more,” says Teddy Rivkin, CTO at Musictoday.

With all four E550si appliances in place, Musictoday is using the gear not only to handle its ticketing operations, but also to accelerate its merchandise sales and fan club applications. “Because they were so well priced, we were able to purchase two pairs and spread the load out among multiple systems,” Rivkin says. “That allowed us to isolate our ticketing business, in particular, from the rest of our business.”

Coyote Point’s Equalizer E550si is a server load balancing and traffic management appliance delivered in a 21-port Gigabit Ethernet switch configuration. It’s mainly targeted at small and midsize enterprises, the E550si model offers global load balancing, application acceleration, HTTP Web compression, SSL offload and acceleration, and clustering, among other features. (Compare application acceleration and WAN traffic optimization products.) 

Musictoday isn’t yet taking advantage of the Equalizer’s ability to offload SSL processing, but it’s something the e-commerce company expects to eventually use, Rivkin says.

Musictoday worked with ISP and reseller Blue Ridge InternetWorks (BRI) for its Coyote Point deployment. When BRI first suggested that Musictoday consider Coyote Point’s gear, Rivkin initially was skeptical because Coyote Point was a lesser known vendor and its prices were lower than competing products from Cisco and F5 Networks. But the Equalizer’s performance and management capabilities won him over, along with the affordability of the Coyote Point gear.

Ann Bednarz is associate news editor at Network World.