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

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

Netscaler VPX, ZXTM Desktop Edition and XenServer

Is XenServer the flavor of the week for traffic management software? Citrix have just this week released Netscaler VPX (their Xen Virtual Appliance version of the Netscaler traffic management appliance), and Zeus have made available a Xen Virtual Appliance of the ZXTM Desktop Edition.

XenServer is a viable competitor to the more entrenched and mature VMware ESX product line.  It has gained a lot of share in cloud environments as it is available at no cost (although I don't expect that either of the virtual appliances will be deployable in a general infrastructure cloud - you need software or a custom virtual machine for that).

If you would like to evaluate ZXTM on Citrix XenServer (perhaps you are considering Citrix’s new Netscaler VPX product), then the ZXTM Desktop Edition is a great way to begin.The desktop edition can be quickly and easily installed to create a full environment containing the ZXTM software and some sample webservers. The ZXTM Desktop Edition is a training and educational tool that teaches users how to solve a range of common web and application challenges with ZXTM.

To download the ZXTM Desktop Edition for XenServer, go to http://knowledgehub.zeus.com/desktop/.  Installation is a snap, and within 5 minutes you should be up and running and load-balancing your first services.

If you would like to run the full ZXTM software on your XenServer virtual platform, you can follow in the footsteps of many of our customers who run the ZXTM software in a Linux virtual machine and get great performance and reliability from XenServer.  Our own performance tests indicate that while Xen performance is not yet on par with VMware, it’s still impressive (almost 2 Gbits HTTP throughput, and over 6000 SSL transactions per second), and well in excess of the performance that can be achieved with Citrix’s Netscaler VPX alternative.

Alternatively, download Zeus' Development License - a full-featured version of ZXTM that may be used for any non-production purpose, such as development, test, staging and demonstration.

Interest in SoftADC devices is certainly heating up, and it will be interesting to see how the other hardware-based incumbents in the traffic management industry respond to this development.  They are an absolute necessity for traffic management in public and hybrid clouds, but Xen-only appliances are not the full answer.  If you want to deploy your application absolutely anywhere, you still need to look to Zeus for pure software traffic management.

See also: Citrix Netscaler VPX - Welcome to the Party!

Owen Garrett

Note to Hasbro, remember the 6Ps.

Hasbro yesterday launched an online version of the perenial favorite Monolopy, MonopolyCityStreets, using the GoogleMaps API. Unfortunately, at launch it all came to a grinding halt.

It would appear reading Mr Monopoly's blog (I assume that's him in the top hat), that the 1.7 million unique visitors on day one! Was a bit more than anticipated.

Details are a little sketchy on quite how the game is hosted, though there are reports of a CDN being involved for the static content. Even with this however, performance today (15 hours or so after kick-off) is still patchy and generally poor.

There has been quite a bit of coverage of this "epic fail", so possibly the "any publicity..." adage could be called into use. But from a personal perspective (and from the majority of people I have read/talked to), this is an example of the 6Ps not being applied.

Ok, the 5Ps? Whilst I was a member of Her Majesties Armed Forces (100% success rate of protecting Britain from invasion, is the quote on my CV), the 6Ps were an often used reminder when things did not go right. The 6Ps in question are "Prior Planning Prevents P*** Poor Performance", apologies for the asterisks this was used in the Army after all!

I realise there is a balance to be struck between the amount of investment in an application's architecture, and the expected revenue to be made from the site (this game seems to be a marketing ploy, so we can guess that the budget was not infinite). However, with the recent arrival (relatively) of Cloud Computing, and the intelligence available in Application Delivery products (oh I don't know, what about that nice one from Zeus Technology), it would not be beyond the realms of feasibility to create a self-scaling environment that could grow to meet any demand. The important bit is that it could also be designed to gracefully scale back down again (probably pretty quickly after the initial deluge of land grabbers!).

One could also build in some limiting factors to restrict the number of users hitting any element within the infrastructure, to a threshold it could handle. So that when it gets too busy, those already using the application do not suffer poor performance due to the large numbers of people trying to also use the application!

By having a really slow application, it takes longer for people to get their tasks done, which has the knock on effect of increasing the size of the crowd using the application i.e. if users can get in, do their task, and get out quickly there is less chance of an application becoming overloaded and not working for anyone!

Simply monitoring the response of the nodes being managed, then just before the weight of traffic brings them crashing down, redirecting further requests to either a waiting page/zone (not ideal), or better to extra resource spun up on the fly to meet demand would be a more elegant way of approaching things.

I am now off to buy up more of the streets in Frinton-on-Sea, a very desirable area of MonopolyCityStreets...

Nick Bond

When did you last get to the Christmas Party?

The economy may not be recovering just yet (or maybe it is, depending on which economist you ask) but companies are already planning for a bumper online Christmas.

One of our customers (who shall remain nameless) is already well into a detailed review of their web infrastructure and we have been having some very interesting discussions about capacity planning, reliability and scalability. A very sensible approach I feel. What was good enough last year may not be good enough this year.

But what if what you had wasn’t good enough last year? Did you spend December waiting for the mobile/pager/Blackberry to ring at some ungodly hour on Saturday morning? Were you dreading the call that started with “The site has crashed” and ended with “when can you get here?” Budgets have been tight in 2009 so there may not have been the chance to fix the problems you know are there but have one more go before everything gets locked down.

I was talking to the CTO of another of our customers and reliability came up. I asked him “What was the value of another couple of 9s on load balancer availability?” “Difficult to quantify given the complexity of the rest of the back end infrastructure” he said. There were too many other elements that might fail. But what we gave him was time. A good Traffic Manager can act as a buffer between you and the internet, automatically implementing traffic policies that give you time to fix problems or make decisions made on business priorities not technical limitations and it can tell you what it’s doing too – One of Dev team got the Zeus Traffic Manager actually talking (with the help of our friends at Twilio).

If you are able to get some budget to invest in a Traffic Manager (just show the CFO the overtime bill for last Christmas) then maybe it will buy you time to get to the Christmas party this year (and increase your site availability with all the extra revenue that brings). Just stay away from the punch.

Nick Vale

CloudStorm Brussels - Load Balancing in the Clouds

In a bubble, in the middle of the sky, talking about clouds...

Zeus were delighted to be invited to present that the inaugral CloudStorm event, in Brussels on September 3rd.  With 175 IT professionals present, the Atomium was the perfect location - sitting in a bubble, in the middle of the sky, talking about cloud computing!

We spoke, not just about load balancing, but also about some of our experiences and our customers' experiences concerning cloud computing, load balancing and application development.  We've found that it's often the application development team who first realize the opportunity that cloud computing presents, particularly with regard to the ability to specify and build the infrastructure themselves.  Coupled with the fantastic application-focused capabilities of a modern load balancer, this is a great combination that lets them build, test, deploy and manage their applications much more efficiently.  There are a few examples in presentation below.

Owen Garrett