From Concept to Reality
3 major certification boards - Board of Certification for Athletic Trainers, Human Resources Certification Institute, and NSCA Certification Commission, all had 12/31/05 as a deadline for their continuing education reporting period. Cyzap was able to demonstrate how its systems can scale up to meet the demand.

New Year’s Eve changed their concept into reality. This is the first time these certification boards successfully allowed their credential holders to report their continuing education online, taking a bold step towards their goal of being paperless organizations.


Three Tier Backup
Cyzap has successfully migrated its data center resources to a three-tier power backup system. Each rack of servers and telecommunication equipment is now equipped with a rack mounted UPS system. This is the first tier of our power backup.

The UPS of each rack is connected to a bigger 25KVA UPS system. This constitutes the second tier of the power backup system.

Finally, the second-tier UPS system is connected to a Natural Gas Generator system through an Automatic Transfer Switch (ATS). When the building loses power, the ATS kick starts the generator which then starts feeding the power to the second-tier UPS system and consequently to the whole data center. The Natural Gas Generator System is power efficient, less noisy and environment friendly compared to conventional power generator systems.

In 2005, Cyzap’s office location weathered three power outages with no downtime!

A Bigger Pipeline
In anticipation of high recertification application load for several of our customers, Cyzap activated two new T1s from Sprint (3Mbps of bandwidth). This allowed us to do better load sharing for our application servers, as well as provide additional bandwidth when the servers were under high load. We were able to ensure that our average bandwidth usage for our servers stayed under 40% of the total bandwidth, which is an industry recommended design goal for any data center.

The additional bandwidth allowed Cyzap to handle the increased load without any noticeable slowness in application or system performance.

15 New Servers
Cyzap assembled, configured, and installed 15 new application servers in our data center to handle our growth and contractual commitments for 2005. Out of these 15, we kept 3 servers in a standby mode that could be deployed if we determined the load for any particular system was going beyond the capacity of the resources that were committed to that system.

At Cyzap, we believe that we can succeed only by making all our customers succeed. So we purchased and configured the additional hardware to ensure that none of our customers would face any issue in the event that they had underestimated the load that would be handled by the system. We are happy to report that we only had to deploy one of those three backup servers and even that was done as a precautionary measure when we found one system reaching 70% of its recommended capacity.

Enhanced Monitoring System
This year, under the tremendous load that was handled by our data center, we observed certain peculiarities that surfaced when the app servers had high utilization. On a few occasions, the web servers got into the mode, where the server was responding on port 80 (assigned to Web traffic) but would not return any data. So, while our regular monitoring system got a response on the port 80, the customers complained that the system was down. After researching (and fixing) this problem, we coded a special enhancement to the monitoring system to check and alert for this condition if it happens again.

It is important to note that most off-the-shelf monitoring software would not be able to detect such conditions!