Case Study: K.U. Leuven achieves scalable, high-availability e-learning access with Citrix NetScaler

Catholic University Leuven provides scalable access to e-learning with NetScaler

Catholic University Leuven (K.U. Leuven), one of the world’s oldest universities, supports tens of thousands of students and staff and runs a large Blackboard-based e‑learning environment plus many other web applications. The IT team faced scalability and reliability issues using multiple open-source Apache load‑balancing servers: adding capacity was time‑consuming, increased complexity and risked downtime for nearly 100,000 students and 10,000 employees.

K.U. Leuven selected Citrix NetScaler (VPX for testing, MPX for production) deployed as a highly available pair to balance hundreds of Windows, Linux and AIX application servers. NetScaler simplified adding applications, prevented single points of failure, and reduced configuration errors while handling peaks of about 90,000 users/day, 220,000 page requests/hour and 2 Gbps of traffic. The deployment delivered improved availability and scalability with headroom for growth and planned future features such as SSL offloading, Lync support and application firewalling.

K.U. Leuven

Herman Moons

Head Central Service ICTS Infrastructures