Case Study: Large U.S. Retailer achieves rapid traffic scaling and millions in cost avoidance with F5 Networks

U.S. Retailer Uses F5 Solution to Manage Huge Traffic Load and Avoid Spending Millions

Large U.S. Retailer faced an urgent holiday-season surge—less than a month to stand up compute capacity for about 2,000 additional customer service agents. Adding up to 150 new servers or reconfiguring existing ones would have been slow and costly, so the company turned to F5 Networks, leveraging its BIG-IP portfolio (including BIG-IP APM and existing LTM/GTM deployments) to meet the tight timeline.

F5 Networks deployed BIG-IP APM on a pair of BIG-IP devices in front of the XenApp farms in each data center (four devices total) and used F5 iApps for rapid configuration, enabling per-user session identification, distributed load balancing, and SSL offload. The solution was implemented in days, avoided an estimated $750K–$1.5M in server CapEx (plus related OpEx and data-center expansion costs), and delivered improved capacity, performance, and availability for the retailer’s Citrix-based applications.