Web switches open e-comm doors at Nettaxi

ne of the most difficult tasks facing e-commerce sites today is ensuring that end users can access to the content they request in a timely fashion. At Nettaxi.com, a Web site offering e-mail, home pages and domain hosting, switches that can direct requests by URL are doing the job.

"All of our content is mission-critical, but some of our services, like those for premium subscribers, are extremely important to our business," says Brian Stroh, vice president of information services at Nettaxi. "With our new switches, we can set aside a separate bank of servers to make sure they are available for requests coming in for that [premium] content."

Nettaxi gets about 55 million hits and pushes out 7.8 terabytes of data to users on a daily basis, according to Stroh. "Now we can essentially say [to our switches], 'If you get a request for this type of content; go to this server,' which is something we could not do before. We couldn't drill down and direct traffic at such a fine level."

Nettaxi now uses six ArrowPoint CS-100 switches to route requests to 72 Sun servers running Solaris. Previously, the company used Cisco routers and software to accommodate content requests through a traditional server load-balancing scheme in which requests essentially were directed to whichever server was the least busy at the time of the request.

On the whole, the performance of the Cisco products was good, but Nettaxi could not prioritize requests from premium subscribers, who might have unlimited Web space or e-mail boxes. Stroh also needed a better way to organize traffic on the site to reduce jams.

Unlike basic Layer 2 and 3 switches, which look at media access control and subnet addresses to determine where traffic goes, ArrowPoint devices make traffic direction decisions by identifying URLs within a packet's HTTP payload and by looking at accompanying cookies that include end-user profiles. Nettaxi has defined policies that instruct its switches to give preferred treatment to requests for certain types of content. The switches consult these policies before sending requests to a server (see graphic, page 19).

Nettaxi has clustered the servers supporting its Web site into four groups, each of which serves up a different set of content, such as premium services or e-mail. The technical advantage of this type of arrangement is that Nettaxi can designate more network bandwidth and server horsepower to the cluster hosting the most crucial data.

Stroh says Nettaxi's transition to ArrowPoint switches was relatively painless.

"When you are dealing with the network that we have, in making sure we have 100% uptime, it was a little tricky," he says. "But we had three or four engineers from ArrowPoint and seven or eight of our own people to make it happen. We met at one o'clock in the morning and it took us two hours to make the change."