PLYMOUTH, Minn. - (Business Wire) To manage its web-based applications, St. Joseph’s Academy utilizes two network connections from its service provider. Recognizing the need to provide automated high-availability for these applications accessed by both students and faculty, on campus and remotely, the St. Joseph’s Academy deployed Ecessa’s PowerLink 100 WAN Link Controller. “The PowerLink does the automatic failover, so I don’t have to make any manual changes on my end,” said Marshall Lucas, Director of Technology at St. Joseph’s Academy. “The PowerLink also simplifies our network by enabling the firewall to only see a single IP address, while the PowerLink handles the dividing of the NATed IP addresses between the three Internet connections.”

Schools need to keep users well-connected for online registration, e-mail, online classroom discussions, video conferencing, web filtering, streaming video for lesson plans, accessing library catalogs, providing secure VPN connections, and other services that rely on the Internet for connectivity. “The message has certainly been getting out to K-12 schools, colleges and universities. When an Internet link that connects students, parents, teachers and other faculty members fails, people can’t get their work done,” states Ron Thomas, president and CEO of Ecessa. “Ecessa’s affordable WAN link controllers are purpose-built for small-to-medium sized organizations such as schools and universities. The education market has always been a strong focus of ours, and one that continues to grow. As the Internet continues to play an even greater role within their IT infrastructure, the need for our product becomes even more vital,” states Thomas.

PowerLink provides greater WAN reliability and increases network performance by aggregating two or more WAN lines, such as cable, DSL, wireless, satellite, T1, and other network links. Educational institutions are finding great value in the ability to load balance with automated failover for both incoming and outgoing connections. With inbound connections, if one of the service provider network links has an outage, PowerLink becomes the DNS authority. It removes the address of the downed link and seamlessly sends the remote users to the working links. For outbound connections, PowerLink intelligently manages the network by conducting health checks on each WAN link to determine network availability and performance, while load balancing each session across the links to deliver the optimal user experience.

About Ecessa

Ecessa is a leader in affordable WAN link controllers for WAN and ISP link aggregation, automated load balancing, failover and network security tailored to meet the needs of small-to-medium sized enterprises (SME) that rely on the Internet for e-commerce and business-critical application delivery. Ecessa helps SMEs rapidly grow their business with 24/7 network high-availability, optimized WAN performance, flexible scalability and secure access - while streamlining IT costs.

At one-third the cost of other competing products, Ecessa’s PowerLink and ShieldLink deliver industry leading price/performance value. Ecessa optimizes WAN traffic for organizations of all types who wish to improve network and application performance and eliminate downtime for business-critical, time-sensitive applications.

Ecessa uses multi-homing to connect a single LAN or WAN to multiple ISPs; enables quality-of-service (QoS) to prioritize network traffic that ensures the best possible bandwidth is always available to applications, especially during periods of congestion; and uses link load balancing and automatic failover to direct traffic to WAN links with the optimum bandwidth and cost-efficiencies.

Over 6,000 companies rely on Ecessa to cost-effectively ensure that each application has the appropriate Internet bandwidth and availability needed to support user and business requirements. The company is headquartered in Plymouth, MN. For more information, visit www.ecessa.com, or call us at 1-800-669-6242.

About St. Joseph’s Academy

Founded in 1840, the St. Joseph’s Academy is a private, all girls high school located in St. Louis, Missouri. With approximately 630 students and 100 faculty and teachers, the St. Joseph’s Academy staff provides students with an excellent and challenging education grounded in gospel values and traditions of their sponsors, the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet. They help ensure that students have the opportunity to practice what they learn through service to the community throughout their four year curriculum.