Global Alliances - Oracle

Oracle's Solution

Oracle® Corporation is the world's leading supplier of software for information management, and the world's second-largest independent software company. Oracle offers its database, tools, and application products, along with related consulting, education, and support services, in more than 145 countries around the world. Headquartered in Redwood Shores, California, Oracle is the first software company to develop and deploy 100% Internet-enabled enterprise software across its entire product line: database, server, enterprise business applications, and application development and decision support tools.

The Foundry Networks and Oracle Joint Solution

Foundry's ServerIron load balancing switches have been certified in Oracle's load balancing interoperability labs. Oracle experts executed a variety of tests against Foundry switches. Contact Foundry Networks for details about the testing, and to learn more about the benefits delivered by ServerIron switches when deployed in an Oracle application infrastructure.

Oracle Application Server is an industry-leading software platform to deliver business-critical Web services and applications. High availability, performance, security, and on-demand scalability are the critical requirements as businesses rely on Application Servers to support a growing number of users. Foundry Networks ServerIron Layer 4-7 application and load balancing switches are the leading choice of the most demanding customers around the world to increase availability, scalability, and security of business-critical applications. The market-leading ServerIron switches feature customized support for Oracle Application Servers to maximize the benefits of load balancing and application switching to Oracle's Enterprise and E-Commerce customers.

Foundry ServerIron switches, when deployed in front of the Oracle Application Servers, increase application uptime, maximize server farm utilization, and shield the servers and applications from malicious attacks. The switches receive all client requests, and distribute them efficiently to the "best" server among the available pool. ServerIron switches consider server availability, load, response time, and other user-configured performance metrics when selecting a server for incoming client connections. By performing sophisticated and customizable health checks for the servers and the Oracle Application Servers, the ServerIron switches quickly identify downed resources in real time and re-direct client connections to other available servers. Server capacity can be increased or decreased on demand without impacting the applications and client connections. When demand grows, IT engineers can simply "slide" in new server resources and configure the ServerIron switch to use the new servers for client connections.

ServerIron switches are application-aware and can inspect many types of application-level content to perform intelligent switching of client requests to appropriate servers. Application switching eliminates the need to replicate content and application functions on all servers, and optimizes overall resource utilization, application performance, and availability. ServerIron switches perform switching based on broad content types including URL, HTTP headers, HTTP cookies, SSL session IDs, and XML tags.

How can a customer benefit? Together, Oracle and Foundry Networks bring you these combined benefits:

Foundry's ServerIron solution provides immediate ROI, and also improves the ROI of Oracle applications and server infrastructure. This solution supports significantly higher application traffic and number of users on existing server resources by maximizing utilization. The Server Connection Offload feature, allows ServerIron switches to reduce connection management overhead on servers, and dedicate their resources to application processing, which further improves overall performance and capacity of the server farms. On-demand and unlimited virtual server farm scalability eliminates the need for forklift upgrades, and dramatically improves the ROI on the server infrastructure. Downtime associated with security breaches and scheduled maintenance is eliminated, resulting in improved availability, which results in savings of tens of thousands to millions of dollars a year.