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

Zeus ensures iwantoneofthose.com site is always fast and accessible even during high traffic peaks

UK retailer iwantoneofthose.com boosts online service with Zeus’ application traffic management software

As part of an IT overhaul to upgrade infrastructure and move away from legacy hardware, Zeus’ ZXTM was chosen over hardware-bound solutions because, as software, it is more flexible, making it better suited for web-based, virtualized and cloud computing environments.

Sagar Vadher, Head of IT, IWOOT, comments, “When Secon first recommended Zeus’ ZXTM, I was not convinced that a software solution would meet our requirements. On a busy day, IWOOT processes 2,000 orders an hour and just a minute of downtime can cost the company dearly. In previous years, the festive holiday season was a stressful period as the entire IT team were completely focused on ensuring the website was always available to our users and customers and we were regularly required to work through the night. However, I was quickly proven wrong when just 24 hours after the deployment of ZXTM, we were able to remove a bottleneck we had previously found difficult to identify. As a result, we saw an immediate surge in capacity and an increase in uptime to 100%.”

Mark Gyles

So, you want to be an ‘Application Delivery Architect’?

Gartner singled out the role of “Application Delivery Architect” to be an IT organization’s next key hire.  What is an ‘Application Delivery Architect’, and how might you go about learning the skills to become one?

The 'Application Delivery Architect' isn’t an additional layer of architectural management. Rather, he or she is a specialist with experience in the various technologies (primarily WAN Optimization Controllers and Application Delivery Controllers, as well as caches and security solutions) that control how a web-enabled application is effectively accessed over a network:

Many organizations will already be able to find these skills in-house and there is overlap with other functions, but Gartner points out that they must be recognised and coordinated by one key role.

The network team hand traffic over to the Application Delivery Architect at layer 3; the Application Delivery Architect then manages the traffic up the stack to present user sessions, correctly encapsulated, to the applications:

An application delivery architect is concerned about:

• Availability.  Making the application resilient to failure begins with load balancing and clustering, but many applications may not cluster well and many different types of failure can occur.  An App Delivery Architect will know how to use session persistence to interpret and juggle multiple sessions effectively, select the best load balancing algorithm and how to construct appropriate health monitors to detect and manage failures.

• Performance.  Most applications have performance weaknesses, whether it’s poor coding, overly-complex page generation or concurrency limits that are provoked by slow clients.  An Application Delivery Architect will know how to spot these weaknesses and overcome them to extract greater capacity from the existing infrastructure.

• Security.  Any vulnerabilities in the application must be sealed to prevent a client from exploiting them, and DoS attacks must be mitigated using a Web Application Firewall or the scripting capabilities in an advanced Application Delivery Controller.

• Agility.  When an organization wishes to deploy a new service or make changes to an existing one, the application delivery architect facilitates and orchestrates the process to ensure that there is no interruption in service.

• Access: The application delivery architect may deploy WAN optimization technology and layers of caching to improve the performance of applications to remote users, whether located in a branch office or on the open internet.  He or she also works with the security team to ensure smooth authentication, authorization and access controls.

• Monitoring and Measurement.  To detect trends and to inform his or her decisions, the Application Delivery Architect will monitor the successful delivery of an organization’s applications, their performance and their correct operation.

The most important attributes an Application Delivery Architect should have are:

• The ability to influence cross-functional teams and drive change, establishing his or her authority through knowledge and expertise rather than taking authority from above

• A strong understanding of how the applications function, and how they behave with different types of clients, including potentially malicious ones.

He or she will work most closely with the application developers, test teams and operational staff to track performance and learn the various behaviours of the application.  He or she will also work with the network team to fine-tune how the application is delivered over the network. 

How does one become an application delivery architect? Your major goal should be to build expertise in the tools of the trade.  Learn how to effectively use the capabilities of an Application Delivery Controller (ADC), the most important and sophisticated tool an application delivery architect should know.  Zeus' ZXTM is an advanced software ADC available at no cost through both an educational ‘Desktop Edition’ for training purposes, and a wide-ranging Development License program for long term development and proof-of-concept projects.  Installing it in front of an existing web application is a great way to begin your journey.

Software WAN Optimization Controllers (WOCs) are also worthy of investigation, bearing in mind that they require a WAN or a network simulator to make the most from.  Replify (www.replify.com) are one supplier of software WOC technology that is worth a look.

For more information, begin with a ZXTM Desktop Edition or Development License download, and take a look at some of the application delivery examples on the ZXTM KnowledgeHub at http://knowledgehub.zeus.com/.

Owen Garrett

Cost-conscious datacenters should look towards software load balancing

Hardware acceleration is a critical component for cost-conscious data centers?  No, no, no, no, NO!  You couldn’t be more wrong (or at least, more misleading and economical with the truth!)

One of the quickest ways to reduce costs in a datacenter and postpone the purchase of large amounts of additional server hardware is to use the acceleration capabilities of an advanced load balancer (aka Application Delivery Controller - definition) to optimise and offload processing from the existing servers, freeing up capacity to handle more traffic and more users.

Application Delivery Controllers (ADCs) accelerate applications in many ways, some obvious and some subtle.  Among the obvious ways include compute offload – freeing the servers from tasks they are not optimized to perform, such as SSL decryption, XML processing and content compression.  Content caching is another easy win, and clever caching policies can even offload dynamic content generation from the servers.  Amongst the subtle acceleration methods are HTTP optimizations (holding back client keepalive connections and pooling server-side connections) and TCP offloading (eliminating the negative effects of slow, remote clients).  Read more here.

It’s an occasional misconception that such acceleration techniques require specialized acceleration hardware.  I met a delegate at a recent VMworld conference who had been convinced by a vendor that it was impossible to perform SSL transactions on a virtual server because VMware did not support cryptographic acceleration hardware!  All of the above techniques can be performed with ease on general purpose x86, SPARC and other CPUs as well as in specialized hardware.  Zeus will happily argue that the combined R&D budgets of Intel, AMD, Sun and other general purpose CPU vendors far outstrips that of all the specialized acceleration suppliers, and general purpose CPUs are advancing much more quickly than single-purpose SSL, Crypto or XML hardware.

A cost-conscious customer should consider a software ADC solution rather than a specialized hardware appliance for one clear reason.  The performance of the software solution depends on the capacity of the server it is running on.  If you need more performance, you upgrade the underlying server, and with Zeus’ ZXTM product, there are no relicensing costs or per-core fees.  For example, a $1,500 server from Dell may be sufficient to meet your needs today.  In two years time when your performance requirements have doubled, you can replace it with another $1,500 server that will have twice the performance – Moore’s law is on your side.  The cost of fork-lifting out a closed, proprietary hardware appliance for a bigger one is much, much higher.

Hardware vendors may argue that their specialized acceleration hardware is more efficient, or higher performance than software running on a general purpose CPU.  That’s not the experience of many of Zeus’ customers, including Isaac Abecassis of Rapattoni.  I won’t spoil his story for you – go ahead and read it, but take note of his comments of the compression performance he measured on two leading hardware appliances, as well as ZXTM software on a Dell 1950 server.

Zeus recently published the results of a series of performance-cost comparisons made between ZXTM running on a range of Sun server hardware and two competing hardware load balancers.  For pure HTTP throughput – the results published in this release – you would think that the hardware appliances would excel, but again they may surprise you.

Finally, don’t forget the cost of building and running your development, test and staging systems.  With a hardware load balancer, you either need to share your production hardware with your development team (like that’s going to happen!), or purchase additional appliances.  With ZXTM software, unlimited development, test and staging systems are available at no additional cost.

The cost-conscious customer need look no further than ZXTM.

Owen Garrett

Zeus launches new plugin for Eclipse

Access to ZXTM’s Eclipse plugin will allow developers to manage all applications from just one environment

The ZXTM plugin for Eclipse will enable developers to edit and manage all of their application code, whether it’s Java, PHP, TrafficScript or any other supported language including Traffic Management logic, from a single environment. It also contains all the necessary tools to allow developers to then build and deploy that application.

Mark Gyles

Zeus to make ZXTM available to all web application developers at no cost

Leading the way towards a significant change in the way people develop web applications

Zeus Extensible Traffic Manager (ZXTM)  Development License will be available to web application developers at no cost to enable the creation, management and delivery of faster, more reliable web applications and services.

The immediate availability of Zeus Technology’s software architecture, combined with the ability to deploy on any physical, virtual or cloud platform offers a unique opportunity to web developers wishing to build and test online applications.

Mark Gyles

Meridiana-Eurofly customer service takes off with Zeus

Top Italian travel group deploys Zeus' ZXTM software to stop downtime and offer secure bookings

The company approached Zeus after servers became overloaded with traffic when online promotions, designed to drive customers to its content-rich websites, were launched.

Zeus' software solution was deployed across the company in under five hours. Dino Zuin, CIO, Meridiana-Eurofly said: "Maintaining brand presence online is crucial because of the highly competitive environment in which we operate. Downtime, even for one minute, can result in significant damage to our reputation and cause us to miss out on vital sales opportunities as customers go elsewhere to make their booking.  As we look to roll out an increasing amount of interactive content to our sites, Zeus’ technology ensures we can deliver high performance to new and existing customers, even during busy periods.”

Mark Gyles

Zeus powers Comic Relief’s site to new heights

Deployment of Zeus’ ZXTM VA software provides greater scalability

It was announced today that Zeus' latest ZXTM VA software will be powering the website for Comic Relief's Red Nose Day 2009 on Friday 13th March 2009.

Comic Relief’s virtual web infrastructure has been upgraded to include the deployment of Zeus’ ZXTM VA software running on a VMware virtual infrastructure. Implemented and installed in a matter of hours, the software forms part of the infrastructure that supports the delivery of the rich media content, the donations section of the site, as well as the call centre teams applications.

Christian Riley, Technical Consultant to Comic Relief, explains: “Zeus was the right technical choice to partner with. Its ZXTM VA application traffic management software fitted seamlessly with our other virtual applications, providing us with an intuitive scalable, robust infrastructure. It’s a tried and tested solution that works and since its deployment, I’m delighted that we have overcome a number of technical challenges we previously faced. It simply does everything it says on the tin.”

Mark Gyles

Zeus at London CloudCamp March 12th

This Thursday sees the continuation of the global CloudCamp events with London CloudCamp being held at the prestigious Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre facilities.

For those of you who are not familiar with the event or format here's a quick overview:

It is an event where early adopters and industry leaders of Cloud Computing technologies exchange ideas. Attendees have the opportunity to share their thoughts in several open discussions. End users, IT professionals and vendors are all encouraged to participate. The CloudCamp community define the content of the events and openly welcome suggestions.

The London CloudCamp format starts with eight short talks, Owen Garrett from Zeus Technology starts off the proceedings with his talk on "Load balancing in the Cloud". Owen finds himself in good company with talks also from the likes of: ElasticHosts, Quest, CloudSoft Corporation and analyst and research firm The 451 Group. Three breakout unconference discussions follow the talks with topics chosen by the audience.

Finally, for those who enjoy their food and drink, beer and pizza is provided during the networking session at the end.

We hope to see you at the event. Owen and other members of the Zeus team will be on hand should you have any questions.

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

Mark Gyles

Case Study Of The Week - Blue State Digital

Zeus Technology, Blue State Digital and the Barack Obama phenomenon

When the now U.S. President Barack Obama was in the middle of his presidential campaign, he retained Blue State Digital (BSD) to manage the online fundraising, constituency-building, issue advocacy, and peer-to-peer online networking aspects of his 2008 Presidential campaign. BSD selected Zeus Technology’s software to ensure that BSD’s customers receive outstanding service and consistent availability during their peak fundraising activities.

“We’re in the business of raising money for our clients and managing the software for social networking for grassroots political initiatives,” explains Leigh Heyman, Lead System Administrator at Blue State Digital. “Since implementing Zeus, our overall site traffic has increased by 400%, yet traffic to our backend nodes has only increased by 75%, while simultaneously reducing the burden on the applications by 80%.We can now do things with our applications that we wouldn’t have otherwise been able to do.

Blue State Digital (BSD) is a leader in online fundraising, advocacy, social networking and constituency development programs for nonprofit organizations, political candidates and causes.