Case Study: Colorcon achieves improved global application performance and end-user experience with Brocade Virtual Traffic Manager

Colorcon Improves End-User Experience and Performance of Applications with Brocade Virtual Traffic Manager

Colorcon, a global supplier of film coatings, modified‑release technologies and excipients for the pharmaceutical and supplement industries, centralized about 80 business‑critical applications in its Pennsylvania data center to serve offices in 25 countries. The company’s aging open‑source load balancer provided only Layer 3/4 functionality, no enterprise support and limited visibility into end‑user experience, creating performance and troubleshooting challenges for both internal users and external website visitors.

Colorcon replaced the legacy balancer with the Brocade Virtual Traffic Manager, a software‑based, quickly deployable solution (operational in about an hour) that adds Layer‑7 load balancing, monitoring/alerting and a TrafficScript customization language; Brocade support also delivered an LDAP balancing routine within two days. The change consolidated six physical servers into two VMs, improved global application performance and user experience, reduced troubleshooting time through proactive alerts and routing, and gave the IT team greater confidence and visibility into application traffic.

Colorcon

Mohammed Irfan Khan

Manager of Databases and Internet Infrastructure