Case Study: Gilt Groupe achieves triple web traffic and 50% reduction in back-end servers with Brocade

Brocade Helps Triple Gilt Groupe’s Web Traffic Within a Year

Gilt Groupe, an invitation-only online retailer known for flash sales, was handling millions of visitors and thousands of requests per second but faced costly downtime, slow page loads during peak periods, and the need to scale quickly while maintaining PCI DSS compliance. The company wanted a cloud-based, flexible architecture that would improve customer experience and reduce back-end costs.

Gilt moved to a virtualized, multi-tier cloud environment using Brocade Virtual Traffic Manager and a Virtual Web Application Firewall in a hybrid setup for payment handling. Brocade’s routing, caching and load‑balancing enabled faster page loads, real-time traffic visibility, and greater redundancy—resulting in a 50% reduction in back-end servers, tripled web traffic within a year, and the ability to serve very large request volumes (100,000+ requests/sec in a West Coast cluster).

Gilt Groupe

Phong Nguyen

VP Research & Development and Founder