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Crossbeam (News - Alert) Systems is one of the leading providers of next-generation security platforms for high-performance networks. The company recently announced that Sportsbet.com.au has successfully implemented its X-Series platform to ensure a fast, uninterrupted and safe experience for users when betting online.

Australia’s leading Internet betting and entertainment website Sportsbet.com.au continues to experience tremendous growth year after year in both the number of customers and transactions per second. When it comes to major race days, Sportsbet.com.au sees large spikes in traffic. For instance, The Spring Carnival horse races in 2010, which is Sportsbet.com.au’s busiest period of the year, saw the website experience traffic peaks reaching 2,000 new connections per second. With these high volumes of traffic, it becomes critical for the site to offer its visitors superior performance, quality of service and, most of all, high availability.

In a release, Agustin D’Onofrio, IT operations manager at Sportsbet.com.au said that “Security is paramount to protecting our customers and the Sportsbet.com.au brand. We chose Crossbeam’s X-Series because of its high-performance, best-of-breed security architecture and modular approach, allowing us to build redundancy at every level, scale easily and conduct maintenance without any service downtime. With Crossbeam, we are able to run a Check Point firewall and have the option to add other security applications to the chassis as needed. As we look to build out our security infrastructure, this level of flexibility is a major advantage.”

It was during the 2009 Melbourne Cup that Sportsbet.com.au initially tried out an X-Series chassis combined with a Check Point firewall that turned out to be a great success. Because of this, Sportsbet.com.au has gone in for a higher upgrade and moved to Crossbeam’s most powerful X-Series, the X80 which offers the highest levels of performance with a modular 14-slot chassis that can run up to 10 applications and scale to inspect a real-world mix of traffic at speeds up to 150 Gbps of throughput. This proved to be a great move as Crossbeam delivered seamless and secure protection despite the heavy spikes in traffic experienced during the 2010 Melbourne Cup.

Jim Freeze, Crossbeam’s vice president of marketing and business development said, “The growing popularity of online gambling makes it extremely important for brands such as Sportsbet.com.au to safeguard the experience for users. Not only do they have to deploy strong protection, they have to ensure their site can handle the massive influx of traffic during events. Sportsbet.com.au’s use of the X-Series offers the best example of what the platform is designed to deliver – a high-performance, best-of-breed security architecture that lets customers enable their business through smart and scalable security.”