Surfline Avoids Web Traffic Tsunami With Varnish Plus

OSLO, NORWAY and LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM and STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN and NEW YORK, NY–(Marketwired – Aug 17, 2015) – Varnish Software, the company behind the web performance engine Varnish Cache, today announced that Surfline, the leading source for surf forecasting, editorial content and surf photography, has experienced significant web performance improvement across its global web and mobile properties — Surfline.com, Buoyweather.com and Fishtrack.com — since deploying Varnish. The world’s largest streaming coastal HD cam network, Surfline relies on Varnish for uninterrupted and fast user experiences and its ability to mitigate the need for significant hardware and infrastructure investments.

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Founded in 1985, Surfline/Wavetrak, Inc. has decades of experience as the leading source for surf forecasting, editorial content and surf photography. Surfline provides hundreds of thousands of users each day with millions of web page views and streaming HD video, for up-to-the-minute ocean weather information — to enjoy peak surfing, marine and fishing experiences. When major weather events strike, that traffic spikes up to five times the normal traffic volume, with news outlets and weather observers from around the globe turning to Surfline for the most current information, forecasts and real-time visuals of the storm, its intensity and its potential damage up close.

Surfline also syndicates a great deal of data through its web APIs, serving content as quickly as possible across websites, apps and connected TV platforms — with frequent updates as weather and ocean data changes. Serving these requests individually from the full application stack every time would overload the system and require a significant investment in server hardware.

Surfline turned to Varnish Software’s leading web performance and scaling solutions to ensure that breaking news doesn’t break its application servers. With Varnish, Surfline enjoys:

Better performance – ensuring Surfline meets traffic demands without interruption, without accompanying lags in speed or service across all its properties without having to scale up application servers.

Cost savings – allowing Surfline to preserve its existing infrastructure and hardware setup without adding to it.

Resiliency & fault tolerance – helping Surfline to ensure uninterrupted and fast user experiences.

“Varnish has given us the capacity to grow without compromising on delivering the most premium user experience available,” said Brian Mezger, Vice President of Technology, Surfline/Wavetrak, Inc. “Varnish has negated the need for adding application servers and has helped us to manage services and continue growing while keeping us fast and nimble.”

Varnish is a commercial suite of Varnish Software’s subscription offerings and professional services, bundled into one package. Varnish is designed to meet the most demanding scalability, customization, monitoring and expert support services of today’s infrastructures, with the flexibility and scale to meet the challenges of tomorrow.

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