Foundry Networks last week announced a new ServerIron server load-balancing switch designed to provide more security and load sharing among servers, especially for ISPs and enterprise Intranets.
ServerIron digs deep into the header to use Layer 4 information to determine the application requested by the session. ServerIron is then able to route that session to an appropriate server. For example, if a user sends a request to the server to conduct an electronic commerce transaction, the ServerIron sends the request to the appropriate server.
Such use of server load balancing is going to go a long way to easing users' fears about secure transactions on the Internet. "The biggest issue with e-commerce are the several different TCP connections that all have to stay on the same server," said Brandon Ross, chief technical engineer for MindSpring Enterprises, Inc., a large Internet service provider based in Atlanta.
Before Ross started beta testing the ServerIron about a month ago, the network was using Bay Networks' 5000 chassis. "They just don't have the backplane capacity that we need for that network," he said.
For security, Ross said, you need to make sure that each TCP connection goes to the same server all of the time. Foundry uses a technique called "sticky bits," that uses the source address to send each request to the server to the same server.
"We're solving the connection management nightmare that administrators have to deal with today," said Ed Kurata, product marketing manager at Foundry. "Sticky bits refer to what in the Web world is called Secure Socket Layers," the security necessary to provide e-commerce. One problem with Internet connections is that people send requests to the server at vastly different rates, depending on their connection, their transactions, and a host of other variables.
"Sticky bits maintains the fact that you're going to the very same physical server," Kurata said. With the ServerIron, "the exact same user coming from exact some location is sent to the exact server they started with," he said.
The ServerIron has a hot standby redundant switch feature, and subsecond detection and failover in case of a server outage.
The eight-port 10M/100M bit/sec ServerIron server load balancing switch costs $6,295 and is available now. The 16-port 10M/100M bit/sec version costs $9,995. A two-port Fast Ethernet expansion module sells for $1,695 and the two-port Gigabit Ethernet expansion module sells for $3,695.
