Load Balancing NewsBriefs: 04/07/00 - continued

Cable & Wireless Enters Resale Agreement with F5 Networks

F5 Networks announced last week that global service provider Cable & Wireless will begin reselling F5's Internet traffic and content management products, including 3-DNS, GLOBAL-SITE, SEE-IT, and flagship product BIG/ip Controller. BIG/ip distributes server workload to optimize performance and circumvent failure. For more on BIG/ip version 3.0, released mid-March, see the ISP-Planet article "F5 Goes After Cisco With Improved Device".

According to Eric Dorsch, director of Professional Services at Cable & Wireless, "Our alliance with F5 helps us provide enterprises with the necessary building blocks for creating a reliable and predictable network that allows customers to grow their market share and sustain their long-term viability." C&W, among the world's largest telecommunications and network providers, offers a wide range of services in 70 countries, including broadband data, Internet access, mobile voice, and interactive entertainment.

"Together, Cable & Wireless' services and F5's products afford customers the solid e-infrastructure that they need," says Tom Pettigrew, F5 Networks VP. F5 plans to deliver a number of technology initiatives later this year, including wire-speed gigabit performance and SSL acceleration through add-on boards for BIG/ip, and integration of BIG/ip with third-party server and caching products to facilitate content distribution networks.
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RADWARE And NSI Software Combine To Synchronize Load-Balanced Data

In mid-March, RADWARE announced that its Web Server Director (WSD) family of hardware load balancers had been successfully integrated with NSI Software's Double-Take™ data replication software, automating synchronization of data across load-balanced redundant servers.

Load balancing products like RADWARE's WSD/Pro+/DS/NP balance traffic across redundant servers for scalability, optimization, and local or global failover. But, to ensure a consistent end-user experience, redundant servers must host identical content, and real-time synchronization can be a challenge. Enter NSI's Double-Take.

Double-Take ensures data consistency between backup servers and source servers in a redundant server pool, whether the servers reside at the same site or are distributed globally. According to Barry Hills, CTO for Egghead.com, "Using RADWARE's WSD, we're able to drop in additional servers and applications on the fly. Double-Take will give us the ability to be fully fault tolerant and host data at remote sites."
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