News
Tool aims to manage IP traffice
- By Peter Bochner
- October 30, 2002
Seattle-based F5 Networks, a six-year-old maker of devices that manage
Internet traffic, has unveiled a solution that officials say can apply the
benefits delivered by Web-only traffic management products, such as high
availability, scalability and increased performance, to any IP-based
application.
The solution, F5claims, creates a new category it calls application traffic
management. To achieve this, the company has added two components to its BIG-IP
network device, which monitors Web servers for application availability. The
first add-in, a Universal Inspection Engine (UIE), enables BIG-IP software to
read any value of an IP-based packet header or payload (not just HTTP and SSL
packets), and switch/persist on information unique to specific application
servers or XML data. The second component, iRules, is a tool that lets
developers apply business decisions to traffic management. For instance, after
creating a Web service, a developer could write an iRule (by specifying which
values in an IP-based header they want to base the traffic direction on) that
would allow a particular type of customer to get more information from the Web
server.
''The ability to incorporate app-level logic in a network device enables an
application developer to offload some of the functions they've had to design for
such a long time in the application itself,'' said Erik Giesa, director of
product management at F5. ''Now, the HA function, the control function and the
routing function can be handled at the network level.''
This makes life easier for developers. According to Giesa, when developers
create stateful applications, they create a single point of failure for the
application. To get around this, they can have two instances of the
applications. But now the developer has to synchronize the two, which is no easy
task. Plus, Giesa noted, the synchronization effort is a performance hit.
The new version of BIG-IP, said Giesa, 'allows [developers] to design the
application in a stateless manner, so they can have several instances of the
application on several servers, and choose which one is the best performing.'
The bottom line, he said, is that an optimal network architecture can be built
quickly without having to make massive application changes or buy expensive
high-end servers.
Pricing for BIG-IP application traffic management software on a BIG-IP
hardware platform starts at around $32,000.