Liberty Tax Service Stays Online During Busy Tax Season with Barracuda Load Balancer
Leading Tax Franchise Maintains Site Uptime for Nearly Three Million Daily Connections with Barracuda Load Balancer 640
Campbell, Calif., April 8, 2009 – Barracuda Networks Inc. today announced that Liberty Tax Service, the nation’s fastest growing international tax service headquartered in Virginia Beach, Va., relies on the availability and performance of a clustered pair of Barracuda Load Balancer 640 models to ensure that its more than three million daily visitors have quick access to the company’s eight Web sites.
“We cannot have downtime during tax season,” said Jeff Sharp, director of network and communications for Liberty Tax Service. “It is paramount that we have a load-balancing solution with high availability that can manage multiple sites.”
Liberty Tax Service provides computerized income tax preparation, electronic filing, refund loans, and online filing through eSmart Tax (www.esmarttax.com) for its retail and online customers. For those opting to turn the task over to an experienced tax preparer, franchise owners are available and complete their returns and day-to-day business via Liberty Tax Service’s extranet.
Each year, Liberty Tax Service sees the number of online filings increase nearly 20 percent as more individuals opt to file their tax returns online. The amount of traffic to the Liberty Tax Service Web sites has steadily increased, as more individuals visit for information, tips, as well as to search for a local office. Traffic during tax season, January 1 to April 15, to each of the eight Web sites operated by Liberty Tax Service ranges from one million to three million connections per day.
“Like Liberty Tax Service, our aim is to offer solutions that are affordable and easy to use,” said Stephen Pao, vice president of product management for Barracuda Networks. “With the Barracuda Load Balancer, we have enabled high performance application delivery at a fraction of the cost and complexity of incumbent solutions.”
Liberty Tax Service displaces Radware for a more cost-effective, reliable solution
Liberty Tax Service’s previous load-balancing solution from Radware proved to be more problematic than problem-solving, and the impending addition of 500 new franchise offices in 2010 pushed the envelope for a replacement load-balancing solution. Liberty Tax Service worked with its longstanding full-service automation integration partner, Electronic Systems Inc., to obtain a Barracuda Load Balancer 640 for evaluation.
“We got to a point where we’d maxed out the capacity of our Radware solution,” said Sharp. “It was very expensive to maintain and without a complete re-write of code, I wasn’t going to be able to add any more servers in the background. So we decided to get rid of it and start anew.”
Within days of deploying the Barracuda Load Balancer, Sharp was thrilled with the time and cost efficiencies.
“Our cost savings were unbelievable,” said Sharp. “With Radware, we paid $180,000 which included lots of complex settings we didn’t need and would never use. We also spent weeks and $30,000-to-$40,000 in consultant fees to get it set up, and it never worked right. Barracuda Networks has simplified everything; we set up both boxes ourselves in four hours, and the solution works great for a fraction of what the Radware solution cost. The difference was astronomical.”
For the full case study on how the Barracuda Load Balancer 640 helped Liberty Tax Service to maintain crucial network uptime, please visit: www.barracudanetworks.com/LibertyTaxServiceBLB640.
About the Barracuda Load Balancer
Available in four models, the Barracuda Load Balancer is an affordable, scalable and comprehensive solution for intelligently distributing network traffic across multiple servers. Barracuda Load Balancers support up to 250 servers with no per port or per server licensing fees for ultimate network efficiency. The Barracuda Load Balancer offers network administrators reliability, speed and security with cookie-based session persistence, SSL acceleration and network intrusion prevention. Designed to achieve network flexibility and operational reliability, the Barracuda Load Balancer integrates powerful layer 4 or layer 7 load balancing. To minimize ongoing administration, Barracuda Load Balancers receive hourly Energize Updates delivered automatically by Barracuda Central to provide the most current intrusion prevention definition and security updates.
About Liberty Tax Service
Liberty Tax Service is the fastest growing retail tax preparation company in the industry’s history, with over 3,200 offices in the United States and Canada. Founded in 1997 by CEO John T. Hewitt, a pioneer in the tax industry, Liberty Tax Service quickly established a reputation for quality computerized tax preparation excellence. The company has prepared over six million individual income tax returns, and strives to set the industry’s benchmark for customer service by exceeding its customers’ expectations. The Liberty Tax Service franchise opportunity is ranked the #1 tax franchise opportunity on the 2009 Entrepreneur “Franchise 500,” and has climbed to #3 overall.