Web 2.0 Apps Bring Collaboration—and Traffic—to the Network

The dynamic, interactive features of Web 2.0 applications can make network performance drag. ServerIron® ensures optimal performance and scalability when traffic volume escalates.

In the past several years, the Web has evolved from a read-only, static phenomenon to one that supports interactive applications that invite and encourage participation from many different parties.

Whether it's blogs, wikis, social networking, discussion forums, or targeted, predictive marketing tools, the Web has morphed into a communications platform that can be leveraged for both internal and external corporate communications. "While the Web itself has not fundamentally changed over the years, now it's being used to exchange information and provide support for customers and partners," says Ezra Yosef, director of business development at Foundry Networks.

Yosef adds that with all of these relatively new methods of collaborating and communicating, it's natural that enterprises are experiencing sharp increases in network traffic as a result. "These are now mission-critical applications, and the information involved with these applications is very important, so issues such as high-availability, performance, and security become crucial," he says.

ServerIron Tackles Web 2.0 Traffic
As Web 2.0 applications join the Web 1.0 tools within corporate environments, the ability to improve the diverse set of applications' availability and performance has become a key challenge. "With so much more traffic coming into enterprises with Web 2.0 applications, companies need application delivery solutions that have high availability, security, and scalability," Yosef says.

The ServerIron products support Web 2.0 as well as many other types of applications, making them an ideal solution for companies that might want to start out with a low-cost solution and expand as they need to.

A key aspect of opening up an enterprise to Web 2.0 applications like blogs and social networking is the increased risk of threats and attacks to the networks. The ServerIron switches include a number of security features to help keep attackers at bay. They include advanced denial of service/distributed denial of service (DoS/DDoS) protection, protection against SYN/ACK flood attacks, email spam mitigation, and an advanced Web firewall to defend servers from buffer overflow, forceful browsing, and other attacks.

Plenty of Room to Grow
Foundry has been working closely with Web 2.0 companies that offer targeted, predictive ads to specific demographics. The ServerIron family of products introduces the right mix of scalability and application performance that these companies require.

"Most of these companies started out with a small amount of transactions and data requirements, but over time they usually need more complex bandwidth solutions," says Yosef. "Foundry is able to help them with a total networking solution."

One of Foundry's customers in this space is Right Media, which has more than 45,000 buyers and sellers and serves billions of online ads each month. "We have refreshed our Web services infrastructure and deployed Foundry Networks' end-to-end 10-Gigabit Ethernet data center solutions to overcome serious performance limitations of other vendors' offerings," says Howie Schneider, director of infrastructure and systems administration for Right Media. "The resulting infrastructure provides the resilience we were looking for and easily handles our current traffic load with plenty of room for growth."

"Companies that operate in sub-millisecond speeds need high performance, stable networking gear," says Yosef. "Foundry's total networking solution leads the industry in density, security, and scalability."