Edge Helps eDonor Deliver Life-Saving Technology

About eDonor

eDonor is an online tool that helps organizations that collect blood manage relationships with people willing to donate it. Its parent company is Haemonetics Software Solutions, a multi-billion dollar publicly traded company that manages a large share of the U.S.blood supply.

Through eDonor’s donor management platform, organizations can customize the software to address blood recruitment and retention needs, ultimately expanding their donor base and increasing blood collections.

Currently, there is a 50 percent donor turnover rate every year, making new recruitment vital and the eDonor software critical for its clients as they seek participants in a short timeframe, such as immediately following a natural disaster.

The Challenge – Quickly Finding a Scalable Solution

Before Edge Web Hosting entered the picture, life for eDonor’s technical team was very different.

eDonor began as a boutique service, offering primarily appointment management software online. As communications technology improved, eDonor’s clients wanted additional software features to help grow donor populations, specifically a telemarketing database, as well as email distribution and short message service (SMS) capabilities.

At the time, eDonor was receiving about four to five million database requests each day. Downtimes were becoming a serious, business-threatening problem, and the task of running multiple servers internally was overwhelming the eDonor staff.  

Lives were on the line, and eDonor needed a viable, highly available and scalable hosting solution. Tasked with finding a reputable hosting partner, Senior Technology Director Brian Burkett needed to find a company with the background, resources and ColdFusion experience to keep eDonor’s servers up and running.

The Solution – Highly Available and Secure Web and Database Clusters

Burkett met the Edge Web Hosting team at a CF United Conference. He selected Edge based primarily on its extensive experience clustering mission-critical websites. Prior to selecting Edge, eDonor self-managed its servers and scaled applications manually using code, a time-consuming and less effective process.

For eDonor and its customers, downtime was not an option. Performance and availability are, and will continue to be, critical. Burkett explains Edge’s initial server configuration was pretty much on the money.

“We needed to keep it to as few servers as possible to control costs, while improving availability and performance,” says Burkett.

Edge implemented a highly available cluster of ColdFusion web servers with physical load balancers, SSLoffloading, Intrusion Prevention, and HA firewalls, in front of a cluster of highly available, high performance database servers in a secure HIPAA compliant configuration.

Of the outstanding service eDonor has received thus far, Burkett notes the company fully relies on Edge to “tune” its systems and keep its servers under capacity for optimum performance.

He says, “We depend on Edge to tell us what we need to do, so if we’re reaching capacity problems, they tell us and we can plan accordingly.”

Results – A Business Saved

As a software tool that literally helps save people’s lives, eDonor is used by blood banks across the U.S.to find additional, and sometimes much-needed, donors. Once on board as eDonor’s official hosting provider, Edge was able to completely offload management of the company’s mission-critical technology infrastructure and help improve operations by allowing eDonor’s technical staff to focus on what they do best—creating revolutionary applications to service the blood management industry.

eDonor, a company that was once a boutique firm dealing with technology growing pains, has now evolved into a full-service provider for its clients, which combined maintain 30 million relationships through the eDonor system.

Burkett knows if something is happening with the performance of the eDonor system the Edge team is already working on the problem before he even has the opportunity to pick up the phone. “Their service is very customer-centric, and there’s never a challenge in getting things done, ever.”

eDonor has complete faith in Edge’s ability to provide the support required to run its operation successfully and without interruption, a major improvement compared to its situation pre-Edge.

“Making the change to Edge Web Hosting is what saved us. We would have gone out of business for sure,” says Burkett.