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Associations/Education

Calgary Girl's School

We’ve been very thoroughly impressed with our link balancer from Elfiq. Installation was a breeze, and the performance is excellent. The Web based GUI is well laid out, lightning fast, and delivers a level of control that sets the unit apart from the competition.
 

Neil Broadbent
Manager of Information Systems
Calgary Girls’ School

Milton Town School District

We had tried other Link/WAN balancing solutions; however, there were always problems. The best thing that I can say about Elfiq is: It just works! Traffic comes in and goes ut just like there was only one ISP. It gives me great peace of mind to know that I have redundancy and don't have to worry about my internet service going down.
 

Fred Wadlington
Systems Administrator
Milton Town School District

Best Friends Animal Society

Best Friends Animal Society is located in a Southern Utah, several miles from the nearest town. This rural location presented a challenge when trying to provide reliable Internet access to the Best Friends sanctuary - Internet outages were a common occurrence until Best Friends Animal Society installed the Elfiq balancer. Our organization was in need of finding ISP redundancy to provide continuous Internet access for our employees.

Our original plan was to bring both Internet connections to our Edge, to start applying for our own set of IP addresses, and to start using BGP with our upstream providers. But that was only the plan until we found out all about link balancing appliances. We started testing the setup with a Barracuda Load Balancer. Not knowing about these appliances, we decided to go with the familiar name.

The Barracuda appliance didn't turn out to be what we wanted. It was simple to set up, but it only had some basic functionality such as only performing outgoing load balancing. We decided to return the Barracuda load balancer after the second time that we found the appliance had stopped responding and routing traffic due to a kernel panic.

More research took us to the Elfiq link balancer. Setting it up took a bit more time than the Barracuda, because of all the options but their engineers guided us through the whole process in a very prompt, courteous, and detailed manner. We were amazed at how much more functionality we were getting, for basically the same price. On top of the web interface, they also provided us with a Windows based application that communicates with the appliance, as well as having SSH access to run the commands right on the appliance. Their iDNS module saved us from having to get our own set of IP addresses and having to run BGP on our edge, while providing fully redundant incoming load balancing.

We can't say enough good things about the appliance, their technical support team, and their sales department. Every single one exceeded our expectations. We will continue to recommend this appliance to anyone we know.
 

Javier Iglesias
Network Administrator
Best Friends Animal Society

Rutherford County Government

The Elfiq appliance greatly simplified our failover solution.  Without it, we were looking at a complicated scenario involving the cooperation of multiple carriers, entertaining extranet PGP routes, getting assigned ASN numbers, and most likely a host of other issues.  With Elfiq all of this went away and with just a few DNS changes we were up and running within a couple of hours.  Now both inbound and outbound services failover effortlessly letting us focus on the problem instead of getting our clients re-connected.
 

Peter Gaulin
System Analyst
Rutherford County Government

Gill St Bernards School

For years GSB's Internet experience was rather slow and anemic due to only having a T1 line servicing about 300+ workstations. It would be nice to simply upgrade to a T3 line but the costs were just unreal for us. Enter Elfiq. While there were a few vendors that do what Elfiq does, none of them came close to pricing, support, and ease of use. Elfiq's Link Balancer solution made it a "no-brainer". With a one time installation process, you can begin adding additional bandwidth to your existing network without any internal changes!

Ryan Roque
Gill St Bernards School
IT Manager
 

 

Gary Area Career Center

My students used the Elfiq LB-500/1000 device with much success.  They now better understand how important a bandwidth load balance and fail-over fail-back device is worth the price.  Every admin relies on uptime.  This device keeps the NA at home at night as it can fail-over and back without issues.  You will still want the call that a line went down, but you can check from home that you are still up.  This means it can possibly wait until morning and it could be back up after you call the Telco.

Businesses (hotels) probably have T1's or quicker for their main business use.  Example, cheaper and faster cable (Comcast) could be the secondary line for data.  As companies are looking to save money, multiple T1's (many didn't offer a backup plan at all) can be cut with another vendor for less money.  Fail-over and back is wonderful. 

Just ask Illinois companies when the Hinsdale Bell Company caught fire.  Many customers had fail-over to more expensive lines (ISDN - usage rate) and did not remember to cutback over weeks later after the issue was resolved and back on-line.  Millions of dollars were lost as most NA's did not switch back.  Elfiq would have saved those companies millions, but today cable offers quicker throughput with less cost than those older days of ISDN, so less pain would be felt.

If I wasn't teaching I would still be an NA in the business world.  We programmed around the issue and then manually switched back.  This product would have resolved the issue dynamically, like DHCP, rather than statically/manually like most forgot.

 

Randy Becker
Gary Area Career Center
Cisco Instructor for CCNA. VoIP, Network Security & Panduit PNIE

Algoma District School Board

It is nice to finally have a product that works as stated all the time.  Truly a set it and forget it technology.  It just works all the time!

Michael Zimbaro
Algoma District School Board
Team Lead - Data Center Operations

St Paul's School

"We chose Elfiq after an extensive investigation of similar products. Elfiq offered by far the most comprehensive feature set and the best support at an unbeatable price. The product has been performing better than we might have expected and is now a critical part of our infrastructure. Our sincere thanks to the Elfiq team for their great support."

Andy Reid
IT Manager
St Paul’s School

UPA

"The addition of the Elfiq balancer into our infrastructure allowed us not only to improve the quality of service offered to our associates, but also to optimize the use of our set of links. Their vast experience and high level of expertise in both network architecture and security, greatly contributed in the integration of their technology into our infrastructure."

Mr. Michel Poulin,
Information Technology Services Director
Union des Producteurs Agricoles (UPA), Canada

Cote du Sud School Board

"The Cote du Sud school board uses an Elfiq Link Load Balancer LB-1000 in order to use simultaneously three Internet links (1*10Mb and 2*ADSL). This enables us to offer a large amount of bandwidth to our users and provides affordable redundancy. The Elfiq installation was easy and without any change to our firewall configuration. We have a very good support from the Elfiq team. I highly recommend this product in education."

André Cauchy, eng.
Director
CS de la Côte du Sud, Canada

CSBE School Board

"Our Elfiq Link Load Balancer LB2000 maximize our four Internet links. The product is very robust and the recent addition of a link was completed in just a few minutes. It is a pleasure to confirm the quality of the Elfiq support."

Pierre Morin,
IT Director
CSBE School Board, Canada

Navigateurs School Board

The Elfiq unit has enabled us to add more Internet bandwidth while reducing our recurring connectivity costs.  The integration of the unit was very easy and we did not have to modify our IP network at all. 

The Elfiq support team assisted throughout the deployment, the service was quick and professional.  The return on investment will be quite fast and the unit guarantees Internet access for inbound and outbound traffic.

Jacques Sansfaçon
Director, information technology and communications
Commission scolaire des Navigateurs

Western Dubuqe Schoolboard

The Elfiq Link Load Balancer 1100E was one of the most cost effective and beneficial units to meet the unique needs of our school district. From the pre-sales to the post-sales experience, we could not be more ecstatic with the service and product support we have received. Elfiq devices work exactly as advertise, right out of the box; this is the true meaning of "plug and play". Without hesitation, I would strongly recommend Elfiq as a product fit for education.

 

Coby E. Culbertson
Director of Technology
Western Dubuque County Community School District