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Web Optimization And Acceleration Solutions

Growing number of enterprises are migrating their business-critical enterprise applications to the Web. While Web protocols deliver open and easy location-independent access to these applications, these protocols introduce severe performance bottlenecks and impose significant overhead on servers. Use of secure Web protocols based on SSL compound the performance challenge. Increasing the size of the server farm many fold is neither economical nor operationally desirable, and many performance problems cannot be easily eliminated by adding CPU power. Foundry's ServerIron solution provides a range of network-based acceleration and optimization technologies for Web-based applications to increase the performance, scalability and security of Web-enabled enterprise, e-commerce and content provider applications.

Overview

Web-enabled IP applications are at the heart of economic activity, and their availability, performance and response time immensely affect the productivity and profits of various organizations around the globe. Traditionally, these mission-critical applications are implemented on servers running different types of operating systems like UNIX, Windows and Linux. Using standardized server and OS platforms to build and implement IP applications gives deployment flexibility, eases management and maintenance, and reduces the total cost of ownership. While the new server technology kept pace with Moore's law and offers increased performance year-over-year, OS implementation complexities still remain and limit servers performance, which is adversely impacted by the inefficient connection management between clients and application servers. Even with the benefits of Moore's law for newer servers, the "installed base" of server and application infrastructure continues to be dogged by poor performance. Studies show that 30 to 40% of the server resources are used for connection management and other overhead, which severely limits application response time, scalability and availability. When SSL based secure Web transactions that are widely used in sensitive ERP, e-commerce and financial applications are added to the server, their performance slows significantly and has noticeable user response time impact.

Offloading SSL processing and connection management overhead from the application servers immediately increases the available server capacity to handle application transactions more effectively. It also provides robust security to server and application infrastructure by eliminating direct contact from outside users to the server farm. Recovering and redeploying server resources for the real purpose of supporting application traffic will protect investment in server farms and increase the ROI (Return on Investment).

Foundry ServerIron switches support "Server Connection Offload" solution (other terms like connection pooling and http multiplexing are also used to define this solution). By implementing this function on the ServerIron switch, network and application managers can increase available capacity of the server infrastructure, and simultaneously take advantage of the application and server farm security and scalability capabilities inherent in the ServerIron. The ServerIron switch front ends the server farm to minimize connection management overhead on the servers by utilizing the new HTTP1.1 protocol to switch traffic from many client-side connections to a few server-side connections. By maintaining an optimal ratio of client-side to server-side connections, the load balancers ensure that the application performance and server utilization is maximized.

Web application proliferation and increasing need for securing Web transactions is driving the growth in SSL-enabled Web delivery. Secure Web transactions add tremendous processing overhead to servers, which degrades server performance, response time and server capacity. The ServerIron switches offer an ideal solution for high availability SSL acceleration and application traffic management for Web services. These switches offload SSL processing from servers and centralize certificate management for added security and simplified operations. SSL-enabled ServerIron switches terminate all SSL connections, and decrypt traffic prior to sending it towards the servers. The switches convert SSL-encrypted requests into clear-text HTTP and forward to Web servers. Reply traffic from the servers is sent through the switch for encryption on the way back to the client. Because the SSL traffic is converted to visible clear text in the network, security filters and policies at Layer 7 may be applied to this traffic for added security.

ServerIron web acceleration and optimization solution also includes many application-level switching and management features to help simplify content delivery and enhance application security. All these features are an integral part of a common TrafficWorks OS.

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Related Products

Foundry's application switching solutions are available on a range of ServerIron products purpose-built with ASIC-based and network-centric architecture to deliver highest availability, performance and scalability when deployed in business-critical application infrastructures. The ServerIron family of products feature the high-intelligent TrafficWorks OS to deliver a full range of application switching solutions cusotmizable to the customer environment.

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