LSA Technology Services partners with ITS to migrate load balancing services

Over the past several years, LSA Technology Services (LSA TS) has had to be nimble and spin up new services that could perhaps be better accommodated and scaled centrally. In late 2022, LSA TS opened discussions with Information and Technology Services (ITS) about migrating the LSA TS-managed load balancing services to ITS-managed hardware.

Load balancing refers to efficiently distributing incoming network traffic across a group of backend servers (or server farm or server pool). Both ITS and LSA TS use load balancers in front of several of their services. Over the past several years, LSA TS's load balancing requirements have changed such that it's now technically feasible to combine both organizations' load balancers into one shared service, ultimately reducing the total number of load balancers and their corresponding support and operational costs.

Load balancing example (source: F5 Networks)

After a brief hallway conversation at the 2022 Michigan IT Symposium followed up by an email thread in January 2023, ITS began considering offering a load balancing service. ITS already had a set of load balancers in their data centers supporting multiple internal customers. If ITS could treat LSA TS as another one of those customers it would allow LSA TS to offload their load balancer service management to ITS. With the MACC network upgrades and the then-upcoming hardware replacement of the ITS F5 load balancers it was a fortuitous time to discuss the feasibility of offering a service.

ITS and LSA TS technical staff discussed their requirements. We determined that while it would not be as simple as copying the configuration from one environment to the other, there were no technical show-stoppers. The most likely problem would be scheduling technical staff from both units to be dedicated to the migration project at the same time.

LSA TS successfully migrated all of its load-balanced services to ITS in June 2024 and by their hard deadline. LSA TS saved over $15,000 on their annual support contract, LSA TS staff no longer need to manage the physical equipment and its operating system, and LSA TS staff can spend more time working with their customers on this and other services, with only a little one-time overhead for ITS to set up the environment.

LSA TS is happy with our partnership with ITS and looks forward to additional collaboration opportunities in the future.

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