Traffic control

Whether running a high-traffic, Internet front-end for a corporate network, or the type of high-density server farm used by service providers and data carriers, the problem remains that costs rise prohibitively as the equipment is upgraded to meet increased demand.

Nortel Networks offers specific technology aimed at limiting the negative effects of increased traffic while simultaneously providing the control functions essential to network management.

Sirshem Moodley, Chief Technology Officer, explains how the Alteon product range copes with the problem to create a scalable network solution.

"Both content and the increasing number of applications that run over the Internet places a constantly growing burden on network front-end systems," he says. "Without the right technology, this limits scalability even though the number of servers increases. Ultimately, this puts the expenditure on maintenance and new equipment up to unacceptable levels.

"The smart solution is to use front-end devices that support the server clusters. These traffic management appliances and smart switches can regulate and balance loads across banks of servers while taking over the load of repetitive network control functions.

"The two types of device differ in that Web traffic management appliances are aimed at functions such as load balancing, proxy caching, content distribution and bandwidth control, whereas the Web switches intelligently filter and route the traffic.

"The advantage of Nortel Networks` Alteon Integrated Service Director (iSD) technology is that it combines the abilities of both architectures and offers a cost-effective way to improve the efficiency of front-end servers. It achieves this by intelligent traffic management as well as off-loading functions such as SSL processing from the Web servers, freeing up additional processing capacity.

"This is a new generation of product which overcomes the difficulties of the two previous types of architecture. If the traffic functions are incorporated into the Web server itself - this was the original model - it makes it difficult to scale the equipment to meet increasing demand from new applications. The second approach - to support the servers with additional equipment - introduced unnecessary complexity by bringing in two new types of equipment.

"We feel that the optimal solution is to combine the abilities of Web management appliances and Web switches in a single system. This creates a single point at which all the Web traffic management is performed, increasing efficient operation without unacceptably higher overheads.

"For any of the businesses that run sizeable front-end server farms, the Alteon technology offers an attractive choice which cost-effectively handles the complexities of ever-increasing Web traffic."