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Geographic Redundancy and Scalability Solutions

IP- and Web-based applications are the fundamental drivers for business operations, revenue and profits for most organizations. Downtime is never an option irrespective of the reason for its cause, and risk of downtime from catastrophic failures at the data center level must be a key consideration in any business-critical infrastructure planning. New and emerging threats, including global terrorism, are forcing organizations to think beyond a single data center for their critical applications. In some instances, the need to scale applications without space constraints is the key driver for distributing services across multiple geographic locations. Such distribution allows unlimited scalability while also delivering localized content and service to geographically dispersed users. Foundry's global load balancing (GSLB) is the industry's most comprehensive and fully standards-based solution to deliver IP, Web and VoIP application scalability and redundancy across multiple data center locations. This solution utilizes real time monitoring and measurements of traffic to and from many data center locations, and applies intelligent traffic management metrics to distribute end user traffic among multiple data center locations for the most optimal and always-on service access.

Overview

Load balancing technology has become a technology of choice to improve the scalability, availability and security of IP applications. Foundry ServerIron switches, with their networking and application intelligence, provide rich features and high performance required for building massively scalable and highly secure application infrastructure. Global Server Load Balancing (GSLB) is an extension of the Server Load Balancing (SLB) to enable geographically distributed applications to scale and perform efficiently. Organizations that serve clients spread geographically can distribute the application(s) in multiple geographic locations, even around the globe, and direct clients to the "nearest" and the "best" location to be served. Distributing applications ensures geographic redundancy, localizes traffic and optimizes network usage. At each location, load balancing is used with multiple application servers.

At each location, load balancing may be optionally used to distribute local client traffic to multiple application servers using Server Load Balancing. In GSLB, there is a Controller that gathers information from various sites about the site health and performance, and when clients request server information, the controller directs them to the best site. Each site can either be just a single server or may be a virtual server farm with local load balancers. GSLB protocol is used for communicating site health and performance information between the "site" load balancing switches and the Controller to assist in selecting the "best" site for application traffic.

Using GSLB, businesses can prevent catastrophic failures of large data centers from impacting their ability to continue operations and serve their clients. Load balancers can manage two server farms geographically apart, and use on of them during normal operations and switch to the other due to catastrophic failures of the first site. Alternatively, both server farms can be used for normal operations with each serving as a backup during failures. For example, a financial organization may deploy on server farm in New York for East Coast clients and a second server farm in San Francisco for the West Coast clients. Both server farms will act to back each other up in case of failures. GSLB is a key Layer 4-7 application to build always-available application infrastructure that is geographically scalable and resilient to catastrophic failures.

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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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