CSFA leverages affordable solution for reliable Internet connectivity for firefighters in the field and for public seeking vital information during disasters.

Plymouth, MN – November 10, 2009 – Ecessa, a leader in affordable WAN link controllers for small-to-medium sized enterprises (SMEs), today announced that the California State Firefighters’ Association (CSFA) is deploying the Ecessa PowerLink to protect its website from Internet outages, and improve network bandwidth utilization. The PowerLink offers the CSFA a simple and affordable method of moving traffic away from a failed connection to a working one, and optimizing the use of multiple Internet connections in order to maximize network uptime and availability.

In California, the fire season is now year round. However, during a fire incident the CSFA website will receive three-to-four thousand additional visitors per day from the general public. Individuals that are affected can obtain vital information about the fire, escape routes and other valuable information.

Over 24,000 California firefighters rely on the CSFA website to record data from the field from handheld devices. Firefighters may also search the website for benefit information, such as long term disability, and other vital information and instructions. The CSFA also relies on the Internet for their internal users for outgoing connectivity and communications.

The CSFA, like many small to medium-sized businesses has chosen a DSL link to serve its bandwidth needs and has deployed DSL in both its Sacramento, CA and North Carolina offices. It was not, however; able to obtain the full use of the DSL bandwidth for which they were paying. To address the problem, the association deployed PowerLink along with another DSL link from a second Internet provider. PowerLink allowed the CSFA to utilize the full bandwidth potential from both DSL links, and it was able to purchase the second DSL link for less than the first link, while getting three times the bandwidth yield. The CSFA also gained link redundancy for greater Internet uptime.

“Prior to deploying PowerLink, our DSL link would go down a few times a month,” states Monty Gearhart, Director of Information Services at CSFA. “Internet outages, no matter how long they are, if there is no automated solution for addressing them causes IT personnel major headaches. Even if the connection went down for 5 minutes it meant we would have to cycle equipment with interruptions caused to employees and CSFA members.”

PowerLink also enabled the CSFA to locally control its domain name system (DNS). If one DSL link has an outage, PowerLink, working as the local DNS authority, directs inbound users to the other DSL link and a cloned web server on-the-fly using a Time-to-Live (TTL) under 30 seconds. “Before we deployed the PowerLink, we would have a four-hour TTL,” says Gearhart. “This meant that I would have to manage the problem during that time until all the DNS servers were reset. Another benefit was that we didn’t have to purchase a separate DNS server.”

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. 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 CSFA
The CSFA which began in 1922 was formed to serve the public and firefighters, and to work towards enacting laws to protect the public from fire, while improving working conditions for firefighters. CSFA membership has grown to more than 24,000. Members include paid, volunteer, military and industrial firefighters, members of the California Department of Forestry, United States Forest Disaster Office, Office of Emergency Services (Fire and Rescue Division), State Fire Marshal's Office, State Fire Service and Training Program and California state-employed firefighters.

WAN link optimization is also known as WAN Failover, Link Aggregation, ISP Load Balancing, ISP Fail-over, Multi-homing Load Balancing, QoS WAN Optimization, WAN Load Balancing, Dual WAN Routers, VPN Load Balancing, MultiWAN Switching, DNS Load Balancing, Application Delivery Optimization, Internet Traffic Management, Network Bandwidth Management, Bandwidth Aggregation.