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National University Deploys Coyote Point to Optimize Delivery of PeopleSoft Applications and Online Student Services

Coyote Point Systems, Inc., a leading provider of Web application acceleration systems, announced that National University, the second-largest private, nonprofit university in California, has deployed Coyote Point's Equalizer Series systems to provide the essential gateway to the university's Oracle/PeopleSoft-based administration system and all online student services. The Coyote Point-powered network handles all online "touch points" for National University's 17,000 students as well as ERP, HR and other management applications for over 3,000 faculty and administrative staff.

"All our applications -- from CRM, purchasing and general ledger to all the interactive programs on our student and faculty portals -- go through the Coyote Point systems," said Tom Tuchscher, Associate Director of Information Technology for National University. "Coyote Point plays a vital role in ensuring that our students can securely access their records, check class schedules, and sign up and pay for courses without worrying about interrupted online sessions, lost information or the security of their personal data. Our new Web site easily handles as many as 1,000 students at the same time administrative staff and faculty are accessing data-intensive applications. We have more performance capacity than we'll probably ever need."

The Coyote Point E450 application front-end systems perform server load balancing and Layer 4-7 application traffic management; the company's add-on SSL acceleration module handles encrypted session traffic. "We manage encrypted sessions with just eight SSL certificates installed on the Coyote Point systems," said Tuchscher. "Our old network, with certificates on every server, needed three times as many. The savings from that reduction alone paid for the Coyote Point boxes immediately."

National's new network replaced a legacy mainframe environment that relied on custom software. Now, the university reaps the benefits of a standards-based Web application environment, using networking and security gear from Coyote Point, Nokia and Cisco, and PeopleSoft's Enterprise Campus Solution, a comprehensive suite of software designed for higher education institutions that manages the student lifecycle, from recruitment and admissions to class registration and finances.

The Coyote Point system provides a clustering gateway to National University's PeopleSoft system which runs on 50 Microsoft Windows and BEA WebLogic Web servers. "Load balancing is crucial in a Windows environment," said Tuchscher. "We have to be able to take servers down to patch without affecting the responsiveness of our system."

"The transition from mainframes to a commodity server environment represented a massive cultural change, but delivered an enormous gain. We're so much better off now," said Tuchscher. "We needed high-availability, high-performance and a high level of protection for our servers. We considered application traffic management systems from F5, but Coyote Point offered everything we needed while also being economically sensible. And since we have a small staff, the simplicity of the Coyote Point solution also was an important selling point."

Coyote Point delivers non-stop availability and a quality user experience in managing National University's entire student lifecycle, resulting in enhanced operational efficiency, reduced administrative costs and optimized use of IT infrastructure and resources.

"Now, the IT staff can sleep at night knowing our system won't go down," said Tuchscher. "And I know that I didn't overspend. I like using proven technologies like Coyote Point."

About National University

California's leader in adult education and accelerated learning, National University is the state's second-largest private, nonprofit university and offers the nation's third largest graduate program. A leader in online education, National offers more than 35 online graduate and undergraduate degree programs as well as online credential and certificate programs. As an affiliate of the National University System, the institution is committed to providing exemplary educational opportunities to diverse populations of students and organizations. National's academic and administrative headquarters are located in La Jolla, California. The institution has 16 learning centers in San Diego and 12 additional centers throughout California, as well as in Henderson, Nevada and Honolulu, Hawaii. For more info, please visit www.nu.edu/.

About Coyote Point

Coyote Point Systems, Inc. is today's performance and value leader in server load balancing and application traffic management. Independent tests confirm that Coyote Point's Equalizer Series systems deliver more than twice the performance and throughput at less than half the price of other industry-leading load balancing and traffic management systems. More than 4,000 customers worldwide deploy Coyote Point solutions to ensure non-stop availability and top performance for their Web applications systems. Coyote Point is headquartered in San Jose, CA and works with leading channel partners in the U.S., Europe, Asia, Australia and Africa. The company can be reached at 1-877-367-2696 or http://www.coyotepoint.com.