Load Balancing NewsBriefs: April, 2000

• Alteon Announces Virtual Matrix Architecture for Web Switches
• Resonate Offers Free Entry-Level Server Load Balancing Software
• How to Survive a DoS Attack with HydraWeb Load Balancing
• Cable & Wireless Enters Resale Agreement with F5 Networks
• RADWARE And NSI Software Combine To Synchronize Load-Balanced Data

by Lisa Phifer VP Core Competence, Inc. [April 7, 2000]

Alteon Announces Virtual Matrix Architecture for Web Switches

Alteon WebSystems is beta testing a new Virtual Matrix Architecture (VMA) that it plans to make available as a free software upgrade for existing Alteon WebSwitches this May.

Alteon builds 10/100/1000 Mbps Web switches and adapters that provide integrated traffic control services like load balancing, filtering, and bandwidth management. VMA is Alteon's new centralized memory architecture that increases the number of concurrent connections supported without sacrificing the parallelism and speed associated with distributed processing.

According to tests conducted by The Tolly Group, Alteon Web switches equipped with VMA show a four-fold increase in concurrent session capacity and session rate performance. Tolly's tests measured the number of HTTP 1.0 connections handled per second, parsing over 3200 different URLs from 50 different clients to 11 servers running WebBench. In addition, VMA's improved memory management allows each switch port to support up to 336K simultaneous sessions. With more available memory for buffering, VMA will allow Alteon Web switches to handle larger content rules and deeper, faster content parsing.
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Resonate Offers Free Entry-Level Server Load Balancing Software

Last month, Resonate, Inc. started offering its entry-level server load-balancing software — Dispatch SLB-Now!™ — for free. Designed for use on Solaris or NT, SLB-Now! can be downloaded at no cost from http://www.resonate.com/slbnow. SLB-Now! balances TCP-based protocols (HTTP, FTP, POP3, SSL, SMTP, streaming media) based on CPU load, open connections, network latency, or round-robin weighting.

Why make SLB-Now! available for free? Resonate markets a suite of Internet Services Management (iSM) software products that run the gamut from simple server load balancing to advanced traffic management. Resonate expects that, as organizations grow, increased traffic will create demand for more comprehensive and sophisticated solutions. Naturally, Resonate will help SLB-Now! users upgrade to Central Dispatch™ and other iSM products when that time comes. Central Dispatch 3.0 starts at $10,000 for two server nodes.
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How to Survive a DoS Attack with HydraWeb Load Balancing

Given this winter's run of well-publicized website outages, network and system administrators have become thirsty for advice on safeguarding against Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks. An intro-level white paper posted by HydraWEB Technologies at http://www.hydraweb.com/press_room/DoS_attack.shtml explains how load balancing can be used to help avoid becoming a DOS victim.

DoS attacks prevent legitimate traffic from reaching a website -- for example, by flooding the site with hacker-generated traffic that overwhelms existing resources. HydraWEB's paper includes a primer on DoS methods: SYN attacks, ping of death, Smurf attacks, TFN, and TRIN00. It explains how load balancing solutions like the Hydra 5000 and HydraHydra can help a site to survive a DOS attack through health monitoring, port blocking, apology servers, redirection, and rapid reconfiguration.

The Hydra5000 is a load balancing solution for Internet and Intranet servers, firewalls, VPN gateways, handling up to 3 million concurrent sessions with a maximum throughput of up to 100 Mbps. For information on HydraWEB load balancing products, visit http://hydraweb.com.
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Goto page 2: Cable & Wireless Enters Resale Agreement with F5 Networks