Case Study: Complutense University of Madrid achieves high availability and scalable performance with Radware’s AppDirector

Radware’s AppDirector Solution Enhances the Learning Experience for Complutense University’s Worldwide Community

Complutense University of Madrid (UCM), Spain’s largest university with nearly 90,000 students and about 10,000 faculty and staff (nearly 100,000 users overall), needed a highly available, scalable load‑balancing solution to deliver critical services across two data centers, 232 physical and virtual servers and a peak load of more than 55,000 concurrent users. The university’s diverse environment (Windows, Linux, UNIX, VMS) and distributed Virtual Campus required integration, greater availability and the flexibility to add servers as demand grew.

Radware first implemented Application Switch II and CertainT accelerators in 2005 and upgraded to two OnDemand Switch 2 (AppDirector) load balancers in 2009, with active/passive configurations per data center and the older gear repurposed for development and testing. The deployment provided global server load balancing, improved stability, availability and performance, simplified scaling, and transparent migration of services—becoming a mission‑critical component of UCM’s network while enabling future virtualization enhancements.

Complutense University of Madrid

Manuel Hernández

Security Networks and infrastructure Manager