Callahan & Associates is a national credit union research and consulting firm with the goal of providing credit union professionals with the tools and insights to continually improve their performance. Callahan provides a series of best of breed internet research products including www.creditunions.com, the leading credit union web site; www.cuanalzyer.com, the leading online credit union data aggregation and analysis tool; industry specific databases and search engine; webinars; online credit union directory; peer to peer analysis and performance tracking; Internet technolgoy consortium; and a host of other specialized services. In short, Callahan provides the leading web properties and reasearch tools in the credit union industry.
As Callahan’s web properties grew in traffic, revenue, and became business critical, it became obvious their existing solution of self-managing their web network was not extensible to the level required by the business. Telco outages, service interruptions, and inability to scale to meet demand negatively affected client experience and hampered roll out of new technologies to meet demand.
Callahan and Associates approached WESCO Net for help eliminating these headaches. By leveraging WESCO Net‘s extensive, scalable, and secure infrastructure, talented engineering staff, and state-of-the-art data centers, Callahan realized controlled costs, improved uptime, performance, security, and the freedom to focus on what they do best: building best-of-breed research tools for credit unions.
To start the process, WESCO Net consultants and engineers met with Callahan’s business and technical leaders to understand their challenges and goals. Based on those interactions, a custom plan was developed to meet their unique requirements. Callahan wanted to improve service uptime. Server outages were seriously hampering site performance. They needed better Telco reliability as performance of their single carrier left them high and dry many times. More tightly controlled security with systems designed by security experts to control access points and regular audits to ensure applications and devices were not compromised. Controlled costs: a budgetable, consistant number with no surprises. Finally a reduction in management headaches. Callahan wanted someone else to handle middle-of-the-night outages, patching, updating, and monitoring.
WESCO Net‘s team of experts developed a custom solution to address these needs. A custom network was constructed to minimize downtime and maximize security. Leveraging one of WESCO Net‘s Tier-1 data centers engineered to service the needs of mission-critical applications for financial service institutions all across the country, Callahan’s custom solution consists of:
- Multiple redundant connections to the Intenet on WESCO Net‘s fiber optic back bone
- Dual redundant dedicated firewalls with custom access rules provide increased capacity and uptime. Maintenance can be performed on one firewall without affecting application availability.
- External hardware load balancing provides seemless traffic distribution across Callahan’s redundant dedicated web server farm. The farm ensures maximum application availability as routine maintenance can be performed during business hours.
- SSL session accelleration provides maximum performance for users of Callahan’s secure shopping cart
- A dedicated database server provides improved performance over shared or integrated solutions
- Dedicated switching fabric provides improved security over shared switching using virtual LAN (VLAN) technology
- Assured power continuance provided by Liebert UPS systems and natural-gas generator
- Proactive monitoring and alerting handled by WESCO Net‘s operations staff
- Historical service and device performance trending and analysis software alerts operations staff to possible bottlenecks, allowing preventative actions to be taken
- Full device management and maintenance offloaded to WESCO Net engineers
- Two-stage full system backups. Data is written to online NAS (Network Attached Storage) near-line storage devices for rapid backups and “point and click” restores. Data is written to tape for longer term storage and rotated to a secure off site facility. Backup and restore operations are performed by operations staff
- Regular security audits performed by WESCO Net‘s security engineers and independant auditors. Data centers are certified to SAS 70 II standards
