Jouy-en-Josas, November 3, 2011 – Exceliance announces that the Institut National de Recherche et de Sécurité (National Research and Safety Institute for the prevention of occupational accidents and diseases in France – INRS) selected ALOHA load balancers for its newly redesigned website.

A website at the core of INRS’s educational mission
Established in 1947, the INRS’s mission is to help prevent occupational accidents and diseases, in particular by identifying occupational risks and highlighting dangers in the workplace, analyzing their impacts on health and safety, and developing and promoting means to control said risks.
Over the years, the INRS website has become an authority on workplace health and safety, as well as a key component of the INRS’s mission. In 2008, the organization initiated a project to redesign its website. INRS decided to keep its existing databases and focus on improving the ergonomics, creating subject-based navigation – with several reading levels – and adding new functions (such as RSS feeds).

Managing load spikes and keeping old URLs
Despite implementing a new architecture that performed better and was 100% open source (Apache, MySQL and CMS Magnolia), INRS was looking for a system capable of better absorbing load spikes, for example when there are important government announcements.
The new content management system’s new tree structure and automatic URL writing module required changing the URL name of 3,000 existing pages that needed to be switched over to the new website. The teams responsible for the project at INRS needed to find a system that could handle, without any loss of performance, redirecting thousands of URLs to the website’s new pages. “To prevent 404 errors, which hurt the INRS’s image and the website’s search engine optimization,” said Nino Di Renzo, Network and IT Safety Manager.
Oversized – and therefore very expensive – and complex to take on and administer, the IT Department at INRS was not impressed by the leading commercially available load balancers. In comparison, the ALOHA load balancers recommended by RMI Adista were perfectly suited to their needs, had a simple administration interface and could handle old URL redirection. “Another selling point for us was the fact that Exceliance products are based on open source HAProxy software, which has an excellent reputation,” stated Nino Di Renzo.

Fast rollout, new future uses
After a URL redirection prototyping and configuration phase and redundancy testing, INRS selected an architecture of two 8K redundant ALOHA load balancers. Online in just a month, no special training was required to use the load balancers and they perfectly met the INRS’s expectations in terms of absorbing load spikes and improving the website’s overall performance, in addition to redirecting old URLs.
Now considered to be a core component of the Web architecture, ALOHA load balancers will be installed upstream from other INRS websites, starting with the vocational training management website.