Case Study: Gilt Groupe triples web traffic and halves back-end servers with Riverbed Stingray Traffic Manager

Riverbed Helps Triple Gilt Groupes Web Traffic Within a Year

Gilt Groupe, an invitation‑only flash‑sale fashion retailer with millions of visitors and thousands of requests per second at peak, needed to eliminate downtime, improve site performance, and scale quickly while cutting back‑end costs. Faced with the complexity of moving from a hosted environment to the cloud and maintaining PCI compliance for payments, the company sought a solution that would deliver consistent customer experience and rapid scalability.

Gilt moved to a virtualized, cloud‑based architecture using Riverbed Stingray Traffic Manager and content caching, plus a hybrid deployment and application firewall for PCI DSS. The change enabled multi‑tier, service‑oriented routing, real‑time traffic visibility, and caching closer to users — resulting in 50% fewer back‑end servers, dramatically faster page loads, the ability to serve over 100,000 requests/sec in some clusters, and a threefold increase in traffic within a year.

Gilt

Phong Nguyen

VP Research & Development and Founder