The company's main client base is big business. But for webhosts and ISPs with big business customers, a Coyote Point Systems Equalizer may provide the best price, without any sacrifice.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [May 17, 2004]

Covington, Ky.-based Riverwatch is not a typical ISP or ASP or webhost. Whatever you'd like to call the company, it's business is hosting IBM applications like Lotus Domino, generally on IBM hardware such as the IBM eServer xSeries (about which, see IBM Takes on Sun Cobalt).

Selling everything from basic hosting starting at $25 per month to high touch dedicated applications, the company's customers, which number about 160 or 170, comprise an illustrious, varied lot, ranging from financial house Fidelity to the IRS to massive PC maker ACER to Kinko's, which needs no introduction.

Nestled among over 100 servers are a few Coyote Point Equalizer boxes, which manage traffic flows according to a relatively complex set of parameters.

Jerry Harden, president and CEO of Riverwatch, says the boxes enable him to use smaller, cheaper, more reliable server clusters instead of larger machines which can be more expensive to buy and maintain. "You can put the app on a larger and larger server, but it's not necessarily practical. There are no economies of scale. Many applications depend upon and Intel-based platform for XML parsers or anything else (you name it) that need Intel to run it. Coyote Point allows us to load balance applications on several servers."

He acquired the first Equalizer E350 about four years ago. The other product considered was Cisco. "We tested Cisco 416s and we still have a test unit." Unfortunately the product is reaching what Cisco calls "end-of-sale" but at the time it was an obvious choice.

Cisco seemed the obvious choice because that's where Riverwatch gets its routers, but Harden says load balancing is more complicated, and requires an interface that's easier to use. "Cisco builds reliable products. Our switches are all Cisco, but there's little administration needed on a switch. You put those things in and they run and run."

Failover decisions, however, may need to be manual in certain situations. "When something happens and you need to reroute something, with Coyote you just use the browser and point and click to what you want in a few seconds and you've got the alternate path going for you."

He says auto-failover is astonishingly fast. "We've only had to failover three times since early 2000. Even the NMS might not register it, it's so fast."

Harden's a satisfied Coyote customer. "We originally leased the E350s. We do that with products we think might not last, but then we bought them at the end of the lease."

Tom Wolf, Coyote Point director of sales and marketing, says the company's strategy is simple: provide customer service and the same features as the competition but at a cheaper price. Sure, but everybody says that.

At ISP-Planet, we think that a company's policy on used equipment is a good indicator of how well it treats its customers. Compared to Cisco or to F5 and Radware, which are the companies Wolf cites as his competition, Coyote Point's service policies for used equipment are very good.

The company charges a penalty, which is an additional 40 percent of the usual service contract price. "But all our service contracts are under $2,000 per year."

Harden says that Coyote Point's customer service team was a key selling point. "We talked to the sales team about what we wanted to do. We talked comparisons, and they told us it would work for us and they were right."

Wolf notes that every Coyote Point product comes with 8x5 customer support for one year, as well as software updates. "This," he notes, "is in stark contrast to our competitors."

It's all about a core design philosophy that focuses on TCO. "You won't find bleeding edge functionality on the equalizers," Wolf says. "You will find everything you need for your ISP and your customers. That keeps our product in a high value position relative to costs."

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