General

Load Balancing NewsBriefs: December 17, 1999

• F5 Keeps Holiday Traffic Flowing
• Coyote Point 4.0: More Reliable than Ever
• Foundry Melds HD Switching, Load Balancing
• Resiliency For Multi-Homed ISPs
• CiscoOffers Intelligent MultiNode Balancing
• Load Bal + Firewall from HydraWEB

by Lisa Phifer VP Core Competence, Inc. [December 17, 1999]

Keeping Holiday Traffic Flowing: Nintendo and REI Rely on F5 Networks
With on-line shopping reaching unprecedented levels this holiday season, retailers and their network service providers are relying on load balancers to ensure 24x7 web presence with acceptable performance. F5 Networks recently announced that Nintendo of America and Recreational Equipment, Inc. (REI) are using F5's BIG/ip® Controller to keep their web site traffic flowing.

F5's BIG/ip measures server workload: number of connections, fastest response time, number of successful requests, and packet throughput. It then distributes traffic across servers to optimize utilization, improve response time, and redirect traffic around points of failure.

Dan Lambert, Network Architecture Manager at Nintendo, explains: "It's absolutely critical to the company's bottom line that Nintendo.com renders great response time and is available to customers 100 percent of the time, particularly with the upcoming holiday season approaching." Kim Muromoto, IS Technical Services Manager at REI, agrees. "F5 Networks' BIG/ip helps us maintain our tough standards for online customer service availability of REI.com."  
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Coyote Point Systems Adds Active Content Verification to Equalizer 4.0
Coyote Point Systems started shipping the 4.0 release of the Equalizer load balancing platform on December 15th.

A new feature included in 4.0, Active Content Verification (ACV), bypasses misbehaving servers by analyzing the outcome of administrator-configured dialogs for each service. This feature eliminates situations in which servers appear to be up because the hardware and OS remain functional, but the target application is actually down from a practical end-to-end perspective.

While other load balancing products (i.e., F5's BIG/ip) also provide ACV, Coyote Point makes this advanced feature available to the entry-level market. Equalizer is a price-competitive load balancing solution: a redundant pair of entry-level E250s can load balance 64 clusters of 8 servers for just $6,995. For installations involving multiple geographic sites, a distributed load-balancing add-on (Envoy) is available for $2,495 per site.   
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Foundy's ServerIronXL Combines High-Density Gigabit Switch with BigServerIron Load Balancing
Foundy Networks recently announced the ServerIronÔXL, replacing its existing ServerIron Layer 4 switching product. The new 400 MHz ServerIronXL can support up to 80,000 connections per second with 2 Gbps aggregate throughput, providing a hearty foundation for Foundry's Internet IronWareÔ load balancing and caching.

A member of the IronWare product line, BigServerIron load-balances incoming traffic through the ServerIronXL. But it returns content directly to the requesting client, bypassing the switch for higher overall throughput. While Foundry is not the only vendor to offer this type of load balancing feature, they do so on switching platform that provides a high level of system resiliency and port density. The hardware platform, ServerIronXL, is available with 24 10/100 ports or 8 Gigabit ports for $14,995. Software infrastructure -- the Management III module -- runs another $26,995. BigServerIron load-balancing software then tops off the stack at $14,995.  
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Goto page 2: RADWARE's LinkProof Provides Resiliency For Multi-Homed ISPs