NI

If you’re a scientist or engineer, you’re probably familiar with NI — the world’s premier vendor of automated testing and measurement tools. The company’s lineup of software and modular hardware is used for everything from circuit design to biomedical research. With so many customers that work in mission-critical environments, NI needs an online presence that instills trust and confidence.

Le défi

NI is no stranger to complexity, but one of its chief difficulties stemmed from a relatively straightforward task: file downloads.

As with many modern software distributors, NI gives customers a way to download applications directly from its website, with predictably large file sizes. But few cache operators can properly handle downloads this large, and the vendor NI had been using was regularly aging out these files from its cache.

En revanche, une grande partie du trafic de téléchargement de NI était acheminée vers son serveur d'origine à Austin, au Texas, pour des clients du monde entier, avec des résultats sous-optimaux. Des rapports sur la lenteur des vitesses de téléchargement ont été transmis au bureau d'assistance de NI. Même les employés des bureaux régionaux de l'entreprise remarquaient des ralentissements.

Ces plaintes étaient particulièrement préoccupantes en raison de leurs répercussions sur l'entreprise au sens large. Comme le dit Robert Cope, architecte infrastructures chez NI, « étant donné la nature technique de notre activité, si nous ne sommes pas en mesure de faire quelque chose "d'aussi simple", pourquoi les clients achèteraient-ils nos produits hautement techniques ? »

Il était temps de chercher une solution ailleurs.

La différence Cloudflare

As a global company with over a billion dollars in annual revenue, switching CDN providers isn’t something NI took lightly. NI’s infrastructure team deployed monitoring points around the globe to benchmark five competitive services, with special attention given to their ability to handle large file sizes. After a rigorous process — spanning everything from customer support to performance to price — Cloudflare came out on top.

In addition to Cloudflare’s CDN, NI also enabled performance-enhancing features like Argo Smart Routing — with compelling results. Since switching to Cloudflare, the number of customer complaints about download performance has dwindled to a trickle, and the NI team is exploring additional ways to leverage Cloudflare’s product portfolio.