The Zeus Blog: Application Delivery, Cloud Computing, Load Balancing, Virtualization

Bandwidth Management but not as you know it...Part 2

Previously, we discussed how many organizations view management of bandwidth from a network layer 4, WAN, network-admin, datacenter perspective and how they should start to consider how they might handle the issue from a layer 7 (application) perspective. I now plan to introduce the use of application delivery controller and specifically Zeus Traffic Manager as a way of managing this process.

Implementing and managing your bandwidth policies

As highlighted in the earlier post the reference article suggests a number of practical policies and actions to be taken to assist with freeing up bandwidth but does not expand on how this can actually be achieved and implemented. An application delivery controller is a great solution for creating these types of policies and implementing them.  The intelligence to implement and run these policies reside on the application delivery controller providing consistency and a non-labour intensive way of undertaking the desired level of management as and when needed.

Organizations need to also consider the consequences of sudden changes in the numbers of users accessing or using a particular application or website, malicious attacks on a service or slow web applications. These all have a dramatic effect on the levels of service an organization can deliver to its customers and increasingly its staff members. The application delivery controller from Zeus lets an organization define the service policies that deal with these problems and applies them easily and non-intrusively to application traffic, web services, types of transactions or groups of users for example.

Zeus Traffic Manager's Bandwidth Management capabilities are used to limit the amount of bandwidth that different services, types of transaction or groups of users can consume. For example, a low-priority service perhaps for staff members that hosts large file downloads could be limited so that it does not consume excessive bandwidth negatively impacting the level of service  you offer to customers, business partners or to other applications within the business that are deemed as more important to staff members.

Applications on the agenda

As the title of this post suggests, bandwidth management can be seen in a number of ways and will depend on where the individual sits within an organization and the types of applications and networks they deal with. As organizations deploy more applications and services internally to staff members and externally to customers and business partners, the emphasis to deal with these in a more intelligent manner in terms of the network bandwidth becomes even more crucial. Now is the time for network and application teams to come together to truly understand how each of their efforts can affect the others : )

For those of you who are interested in find out more about the Zeus approach to managing your bandwidth further information can be found here.

Mark Gyles

Optimizing your application for mobile device access

Short post this time inspired by a recent piece from Kristina O'Connell at Crescendo Networks titled 'Optimize Applications for Mobile Browsers'.

The piece highlights a Gartner report anticipating the growth in 2010 of handsets that will be capable of rich mobile commerce (Gartner's Top Ten Strategic Technologies for 2010). These handsets will look to access websites or other web applications and therefore as Kristina points out there will be a need to optimize your applications for this.

Kristina touches on the performance issues of applications being accessed by mobile handsets and offers good practical advice on how to achieve these optimizations citing data compression as one example, and how this can free up resources within your existing infrastructure.

However, at this stage it is important to add a further element to the discussion, but without delving too deep into the technical aspects: )  It is all very well and good optimizing your applications for access by mobile handsets/devices. But as we all know the number of handset/devices with different capabilities and frequency with which they come onto the market is quite amazing.

Therefore it is important that you optimize your applications accordingly for each different handset/device looking to access your website and web applications.

How can you do this?

Well, thanks to Luca Passani at WURFL (Wireless Universal Resource File) and his contributors, including individuals from a number of the carriers, there is a way! WURFL is basically a global database of all devices and their capabilities. As noted on the site, 'WURFL is an XML configuration file which contains information about capabilities and features of many mobile devices. The main scope of the file is to collect as much information as we can about all the existing mobile devices that access WAP pages so that developers will be able to build better applications and better services for the users.'

Luca and his many contributors also offer a Java API which is great news for those users of Zeus Traffic Manager who looking to undertake this type of application optimization on their application delivery controller.

Interested parties can find out more in an article by Zeus' Yvan Seth on our Zeus KnowledgeHub resource.

Mark Gyles

Bandwidth management but not as you know it...

This is part 1 of a two part post inspired by an article I found myself reading earlier this month titled ‘better understand bandwidth and your enterprise’s needs’. The article by Bruce Gain provides a practical hands-on approach to managing bandwidth for network admins who handle the network and the traffic through it.

Network layer 4

The article is a great example of how many organizations look at managing their bandwidth and how they might manage staff access and use of applications and web services above and beyond asking their ISP for larger pipes. The article and approaches contained within tends to resonate well with those viewing management of bandwidth from a network layer 4 traffic, WAN, network-admin, datacenter perspective : )

What about the application layer?

Well it's all very well and good talking about management of bandwidth at layer 4. But, actually when we start talking about how to ensure staff access and use of applications doesn’t have a negative impact on network bandwidth, we should be taking the discussion to the next level, the application layer of 7. At this layer an organization is able to use many more intelligent ways of managing the traffic to and from applications and manage how their use will impact or not impact the existing network infrastructure and resource.

How can this be achieved I hear you ask? Well in this situation an application delivery controller (application traffic manager, layer 7 load balancer, what-ever you wish to call it) can be used.

Other factors at play

Many organizations have applications running internally that take up network resource. Bandwidth is a key shared resource, and its misuse by one staff member could adversely affect the level of service that other staff members might experience.

At this point we should also consider two further elements that impact this discussion. Firstly, it may-be that unlike in the article which references ownership of dealing with the network bandwidth usuage residing with network admins, the onus may actually move to the applications teams whom have responsibility for the roll-out and use of applications on the network. We also need to think about the impact of staff access and usage of applications and services on the network, and how this might affect an organizations capability of offering services from an external facing web services point of view. The external facing web services may give customers and partners access to applications that are critical to doing business with them. Alternatively it may offer users/visitors the ability to buy goods and services over the web. An organization will need to seriously think about how they are going to ensure that the most valuable users get the best possible level of service from the resources available.

In part 2 of this post, available towards the end of this week, I will discuss how Zeus Traffic Manager (application delivery controller) can be used to implement and manage service policies. Service policies can deal with the issues that can cause bandwidth headaches for many IT professionals and organizations.

Mark Gyles

Zeus gets to wear a crown

Tuesday 17 Nov saw us gain further industry recognition for our solution, Zeus Traffic Manager. We were named by the Techworld Awards 2009 as Infrastructure Product of the Year. The solution was recognised for improving network and web-enabled applications by making them faster, more reliable, secure and easier to manage. The award assesses solutions that sit on the network including servers, routers, switches or accelerator/bandwidth shapers. 

So what, I hear you cry!

Well, everyone likes to gain recognition for what they do whether as an individual or a business and we're no different. This award adds weight to the fact that the businesses we talk to on a daily basis continue to see the importance of what our solution can offer them when they are looking to scale their networked application capabilities quickly. As a I am sure some of you will have experienced we place great emphasis on continually improving Zeus Traffic Manager through our R&D team. Whether you are looking for traffic management or load balancing capabilities in a physical, virtual or cloud environment makes no difference to us - you still get all the bells and whistles and great performance...

Other industry recognition and analyst reports can be viewed here.

Mark Gyles

How do I start using Zeus on Amazon Web Services

Following on from my earlier post where I mentioned that users of Amazon Web Services (EC2) could now use Zeus Traffic Manager on a pay-as-you-go basis. Well the folks in the R&D team have been busy always. Euan Harris in particular, has put together a series of FAQ's that will give you a good insight into how you can get started using Zeus on Amazon Web Services. I am sure these will be added to over time : )

The FAQ's which can be found on our technical resource site: ZeusKnowledgeHub cover the following topics:

• How do I configure my Zeus instance on EC2?

• How do I sign up to use Zeus AMI on EC2?

• How do I launch a new Zeus instance using Amazon's command line tools?

These FAQs are designed to give readers a step by step guide and we would encourage you to leave comments having run through them.

Mark Gyles

Pay-as-you-go traffic management on Amazon Web Services

Today saw the availability of Zeus Traffic Manager and Zeus Load Balancer on EC2 as Amazon Machine Images (AMIs). For those of you who don't know, an AMI is a template from which EC2 virtual machines, called instances, can be created. An instance is essentially a Zeus virtual appliance packaged for use on EC2.

Making the Zeus solution available on the EC2 platform on a pay-as-you-go hourly basis will make developing web services easier for developers and companies, particularly during the planning and production stages. By using a simple web service interface, users can monitor and control web traffic and automate maintenance to ensure online services are always fast and available even during high peaks in web traffic.

One recent example of this in action is with a UK company called HomeMade Digital. These guys are a digital service provider for a number of major UK charities. When HomeMade's clients need to respond to web traffic emergencies quickly, HomeMade need to be able to scale their IT infrastructure offering to provide the capacity to handle extra web traffic without any interuptions to service. HomeMade recently rolled out the full functionality of the Zeus Traffic Manager onto the Amazon Web Services Cloud. Adopting this approach has allowed them to keep data transfer and client hardware costs to a minimum.

If you would like to sign up to use Zeus Traffic Manager on Amazon EC2 you can find out more here.

Mark Gyles

Webinar: Read/Write Load Balancing for MySQL with Zeus Traffic Manager in the Joyent Public Cloud

Tuesday, November 17, 10am PST/6pm GMT

Raja Srinivasan from Zeus will be presenting alongside Rod Boothby, Joyent and Jimmy Guerrero, Sun Microsystems. This webinar will explore how to load balance MySQL in the Joyent Public Cloud with Zeus Traffic Manager and will demonstrate how Zeus Traffic Manager inspects, manages and load balances MySQL connections.

You can also expect a technical deep-dive into the best practices concerning high availability, performance and scaling in the cloud. If you are interested in learning more about how you can accelerate the development and deployment of MySQL-backed web applications, in the cloud, this webinar is for you.

To find out more and to register please click here.

Mark Gyles

Zeus Podcast - Application Delivery: What are my load balancing options?

This week's edition focusses on the sorts of options that are open to you when looking at using an application delivery controller to perform load balancing. You can listen to the podcast in .mp3 format by clicking on the link below.

Hosts: Mark Gyles, Nick Bond

Download: Application Delivery: What are my load balancing options?

Nick and Mark discuss how 'simple' load balancing became the foundation of application traffic management (aka by Gartner as Application Delivery Controllers) as we know them today. Nick gives an overview of the origins, functionality and evolution of load balancing and application delivery. He continues by explaining how the Zeus solution adds real intelligence to the way application traffic is load balanced and managed using scripting langauges such as TrafficScript.

He concludes by discussing the differences between using custom hardware Application Delivery Controller appliances and the options that are available in terms of deploying SoftADC's (Zeus Traffic Manager) on commodity hardware.

We would like to hear from listeners who may have topic suggestions that they would like to see offered in the podcast format. Please email: blog(at)zeus.com with your suggestions or any other feedback you may have once having listened to this podcast.

Mark Gyles

Application Delivery For Your Business.

As an organisation we at Zeus can sometimes get really focused on our technology, and forget why the Zeus Traffic Manager was developed in the first place. Speaking to a customer of ours at a recent Cloud Camp, brought my focus back to that place.

Whether it is simply improving the customer experience or helping creating real value in an online appliction. Application delivery is there to improve the bottom line results. No company would deploy this technology unless (in some way) it helped their business.

Our customer (hello Steven) has been using Zeus Traffic Manager for a few years now and has progressed to become a Level 30 Script Wizard. He manages an online operation that sells quite high value packages.

One problem he has, and I am sure this is similar to many people in this type of position, is that sometimes the operational staff lose sight of exactly what the application traffic on 
their network actually equates to. It just becomes "the job" and the value of a particular transaction almost becomes invisible.

Therefore when some maintenance is scheduled, and a server node is put into "Draining" (not permitting new connections, but allowing existing ones to time out) sometimes impatience can get the better of a SysAdmin. Instead of waiting until there are no connections left on the draining node, it could be taken out of service when there are just 3 or 4 left. Without knowledge of the value to the business contained in these customer's shopping baskets, this seems a minor thing to do. However, if you knew that the combined value of those baskets was £10,000 you might think twice about shutting the server down too soon.

For this reason our customer put in place a Traffic Script rule (gathering the value of all the shopping baskets associated with a server) to help illustrate how much turning off a particular server could possibly cost the business (assuming the interuption caused the customer to leave and never come back). Because pictures say a thousand words, the data from the rule was pushed into the Zeus Traffic Manager's graphing functionality within the web based user interface.

The result is that the operational staff are able, at a glance, to see the present value of all the active customer connections on the draining server. Hopefully, convincing them to wait a few minutes more before pulling the plug on a server for an upgrade.

Nick Bond

Zeus on the road...

Oracle OpenWorld 2009, San Francisco, USA, October 11-15

Zeus will be attending Oracle OpenWorld 2009 in San Francisco, USA on October 11-15.

For those of you who have already registered to attend or are thinking of attending the Zeus booth can be located in the Moscone South Hall, booth #2620. Further details, registration and more can be found here.

Oracle OpenWorld brings you more than 1,800 sessions, 400 partner exhibits, keynotes from the world’s technology leaders, hands-on labs, several special networking events, and more.

We hope to see you at the event. Zeus staff will be on hand throughout the event should you have any questions about Zeus or our solution offerings.

If you would like to set up a meeting with a Zeus member of staff while you are at the event please email: info(at)zeus.com.

Zeus is part of the Oracle Partner Network. The Zeus Traffic Manager is available for development purposes on the Oracle VM Platform. The easy to deploy and use Developer’s release of ZXTM, built as an Oracle VM Template is now available. Oracle developers can access the Zeus Traffic Manager developer license by clicking here.

CloudStorm London, UK, October 13

Zeus will be attending and presenting at the next event in London. For those of you already booked to go and those considering a trip, you may be interested to know that Zeus' Owen Garrett will be presenting on the topic of "Load balancing in the Cloud".

CloudStorm is a new style event set up by companies offering innovating solutions in cloud computing. At CloudStorm, you will receive in 100 minutes an update of the latest trends and products in Cloud Computing, followed by a mini expo and networking opportunity.

Further details, registration and a full agenda can be found here.

Mark Gyles