ZyXel Case Study

Founded in 1989, ZyXEL Communications Corp. is a world class networking company providing innovative and reliable Internet solutions. ZyXEL offers complete networking solutions for Telco’s, small to medium-sized businesses, and digital home users for a wide range of deployment scenarios. ZyXEL products have reached more than 400,000 small and medium-sized businesses and 100 million end-users worldwide for a quarter century. Headquartered in Taiwan, ZyXEL employs about 1,000 people and operates 35 subsidiaries across Asia, Europe, and the Americas.

ZyXEL uses its website to provide product information, downloads, end-user license agreements, and forums to current and prospective customers around the world. “To deliver web resources quickly to users of the site, we need to serve our content from a wide array of locations,” says Edward Yu, AVP of Information Service Division. ZyXEL hosts its websites on two physical servers located in Taiwan and Denmark and for three years, used a popular content delivery network (CDN) provider to meet its need for high availability and strong performance

However, the CDN solution proved expensive -- well over what the company was prepared to pay over the long term. After analysis confirmed that the company’s content delivery costs would remain too high with its current supplier, the company began to reviewing other CDN solutions. “We wanted to reduce our costs by as much as possible,” says Yu.

ZyXEL wanted to serve dynamic and static content at acceptable performance levels, gain the flexibility to easily modify its website, and push changes out to users quickly regardless of location. The company evaluated CDN providers by identifying how their solutions could meet its requirements. They assessed the providers’ credentials and past performance to determine whether web content could be changed easily and delivered quickly on the vendor’s platform, and if the CDN provided multi-origin architecture support.

After a two-month review, ZyXEL determined that Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Amazon CloudFront offered the best-value content delivery network in the market, with the highest-availability, and would be the easiest to manage. “For a tiny percentage of our existing costs, the company could deliver website content to users worldwide using the global network of AWS Edge Locations,” says Yu.

After a two-month long period in which engineers finalized the proof of concept, ZyXEL worked with an AWS Solutions Architect to help migrate its website content delivery network to AWS. “This person worked tirelessly for us on weekdays and weekends to remove any technical obstacles that presented themselves and significantly contributed to our seamless switchover to Amazon CloudFront,” says Yu. The company switched its CDN service over to Amazon CloudFront in one day in June 2013. As demonstrated in Figure 1, CloudFront pulls content from servers in Denmark and Taiwan, caches the content, and then deliver it to millions of users all over the world.

ZyXEL uses AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) to control access to Amazon CloudFront resources and limit the actions that individual users or user groups can undertake. This allows ZyXEL administrators to minimize the risk of employees undertaking duplicate or incompatible tasks that may affect website availability or response times. The company has also signed up for AWS Support, Business-level, and Yu is happy with the support’s team’s rapid response to incidents during the migration process.

“The satisfaction level among our customers is the same as it was when we used the previous CDN service while our costs have decreased,” says Yu. Running on AWS helped ZyXEL reduce the operating expenditure for its CDN by more than 99 percent. The company can use AWS APIs or the management console to easily create and modify components of its CDN, removing the need for external assistance.

By leveraging AWS and Amazon CloudFront, ZyXEL can make new content, forums, and downloads available to users worldwide as needed. “AWS provides us with a robust platform to continue to grow our business in current and new markets,” says Yu.