deRemate.com began its operations on August 31, 1999. It is the e-commerce leader for individuals in Latin America. Also, it currently operates its products DeReto.com, DeMotores.com, DePagos.com and ZonaJobs.com in the most important markets of the continent, including Argentina, Chile, Colombia and Mexico.

The company has a base of more than 2.5 million registered users, who generate 220 million visits to products on the site annually. Since it was created, it registered more than 2,500,000 closed transactions, and accumulated gross sales of merchandise over US$230 million. In 2005, deRemate.com experienced a 40 percent growth, and foresees a future growth of more than 50 percent.

The Challenge: Optimize the Platform to Respond to the Company’s Growth

deRemate decided to improve its IT platform performance to be able to offer better service to its increasingly demanding customers. For that reason, a change in the load balancing and distribution product was evaluated.

“The decision to upgrade to Citrix was made to support our growth. It was a step that we had to take so that our business could evolve,” Pablo García Melga, networking manager, explained.

Deploying Citrix NetScaler to Improve Load Balancing

At present, the solution not only supports the whole deRemate site, but also other sites and services offered by the company, such as DePagos.com, DeReto.com, DeMotores.com and ZonaJobs.com.

Even though the deployment was carried out in the Miami, Florida datacenter, the purchase was made through ETEK Argentina, a Gold Citrix® Solution Advisor.

“We chose Citrix NetScaler because it offered a series of unique features, which were not present in any of the other platforms we considered. This was a competitive advantage beyond the price,” García Melga stated.

Reduction of Response Times to Offer Better Services to Users

Due to the nature of the business, response time is a fundamental aspect that deRemate.com had to consider in order to be able to offer users a better experience with all of its products. Thanks to the Citrix application delivery solution, the sites’ average response time increased by 110 percent, even with 15,000 concurrent users at peak times.

Citrix NetScaler responded efficiently to the difference in traffic load, which enabled the company to maximize its resources and use them in other business areas, such as advertising. By supporting Internet-based promotional methods, the company no longer required the outsourcing of infrastructure use to this end. “It gave us the opportunity to save important resources,” García Melga explained.

Citrix NetScaler offers unique features. Among them are its combination of load balancing and layer 4-7 content switching, and the capacity to route requests to different computers based on a URL hash. This enhances and accelerates the internal cache performance, since every cache appliance specializes in a function of the system.

Thanks to these functions, the Citrix solution improved site performance and availability, reducing the load on the different infrastructure components. As a result, CPU usage decreased by 50 percent in cache servers. Additionally, “the hit ratio rose from 70 percent to 85 percent, which means a greater quantity of requests served directly by the cache,” the networking manager pointed out.

Citrix NetScaler is not only a unique solution with simple deployment in the market for Web application optimization, but it also generates savings in hardware and operating costs. “We didn’t have to reduce the number of appliances but it enabled us to extend their life. For that reason, it represents future cost savings, because we could continue using the same amount of hardware instead of having to add more equipment a few months later.” At the same time, the logon information consolidation was simplified, which led to 40-percent savings on navigation log information consolidation and management costs.

The decision to deploy Citrix NetScaler was strategic to the company and, even though the return on investment was not a crucial factor, the amount invested was recovered in six months.

“Citrix Netscaler customer support was excellent,” García Melga said. Without even having a customer number, the support service registered the request and gave a quick and satisfactory technical answer, which allowed deRemate.com to continue operating seamlessly.

Future Plans

Due to its current growth, the company is evaluating supporting different vertical portals to be launched in the future by means of Citrix NetScaler.

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