TUI Belgium, a division of TUI Travel, is the largest tourism group in Belgium. Jetair and the other tour operator brands from TUI Belgium are leaders in the Belgian holiday travel sector with more than 30 travel brochures containing many travel destinations and packages. Jetair holidays can be booked through any authorized Belgian travel agency, as well as at any of the 127 Jetaircenter travel agencies. The Jetairfly airline company, which is Belgium’s second largest, transports up to two million travelers yearly.

The challenge: enable e-business to take off

During the last few years, Jetair found that the load on its Web servers was increasing. “Our e-commerce Web sites get a large number of concurrent visitors, especially during the high season, with the highest number in January when the load triples,” said Ignace Quaghebeur, system engineer at Jetair. “The system was at its limit. It is difficult to quantify the effect of the Web sites’ performance, but it’s clear it was having an impact on our business due to unsatisfied or irritated customers. We started looking for a solution to increase the overall performance of our Web-based system and improve its ability to handle peak loads easily.” In addition, the solution needed to be able to guarantee availability of the Web sites by adding redundancy without modifications to applications.

Implementing Citrix NetScaler for accelerating Linux-based Web applications

The organization decided to do a proof of concept using an appliance from a preferred supplier. Although the compression technology worked fine, the device was much too complicated. “Because we do not want to be dependent on anybody for administration of mission-critical applications, we choose to manage these ourselves — and this device was too complex for our team to handle. The problems included a poor graphical interface, complexity of the numerous settings on the command line and complicated configuration files.”

Quaghebeur continued, “We expanded our selection process by evaluating products from two other manufacturers. The evaluation of Citrix NetScaler started in December 2007 and we decided to test a real-life situation with the system in the production environment, just before our peak month of January 2008. The compression and optimization worked so well and the administration was so easy that we decided to keep the system in production during this business-critical month and afterwards.”

The evaluation of Citrix® NetScaler®, Enterprise Edition, including initial installation, was done together with ePact, a Gold Citrix Solution Advisor. Three Web servers are now accelerated and optimized with NetScaler, Enterprise Edition (one high availability, or HA, appliance pair) from the Jetair datacenter located in the city of Oostende.

A solution that handles future performance and scalability needs

Citrix NetScaler immediately proved its effectiveness and prevented performance problems in January 2008. NetScaler prevented overloading of the Internet connection and optimized network traffic by caching and compressing Web pages and data. Because compression is now moved to NetScaler, the Web servers are freed up and performing well. “Previously, the Web servers showed an average load of 80 percent but now are idle for 80 percent. Thanks to the load-balancing features of NetScaler, the workload is now equally divided over three Web servers,” continued Quaghebeur.

“We see an increasing number of customers using the Internet to gather product information, consult prices, or book holidays and airline tickets, and therefore we are gradually moving to an e-business model. Thanks to Citrix NetScaler, we are assured of a very fast service, now and in the future, which is capable of handling high peaks of load in the busiest months or during sales offers.”

The load-balancing function of Citrix NetScaler enables Jetair to perform routine maintenance on its Web servers without downtime. With two NetScaler appliances in an HA setup, the service is kept online 24 hours a day and seven days a week, which enables Jetair to service customers at night and from different time zones.

Citrix NetScaler saves 30.000 euros

All of Jetair’s Web applications for travel and flight holidays are developed and maintained in house. “Before NetScaler, our developers were spending a lot of time optimizing code in the applications to speed them up. In addition, maintaining complex Apache SSL configurations, rules and conditions was very time consuming,” added Quaghebeur.

“NetScaler drastically changed this situation. Thanks to the load-balancing features, it is not necessary to modify the applications to enable them run on multiple Web servers. And the previously complex SSL configurations now can be done in the appliance. The graphical interface is really fantastic: everything can be configured with a few mouse clicks and this saves us a lot of time.” Software developers at Jetair no longer have to optimize applications but instead can focus on more important aspects, such as the design and the functionality of the applications.

Instead of adding expensive bandwidth to improve application access performance, Citrix NetScaler optimization technology enables Jetair to operate with the same bandwidth as two years ago. The organization expects that this solution can handle growth for the next two years. Quaghebeur said, “NetScaler processes more than 200 hits per second, and is able to grow to at least a thousand hits per second. Without NetScaler, we would have needed additional servers to handle growth. Avoiding buying additional servers and upgrading bandwidth saved us over 30.000 euros immediately. In addition to all the other advantages of this Citrix solution, this is an attractive return on investment."