Targeting overworked Web sites

By Bob Brown
Network World, 12/29/97

When Cheng Wu helped start up Internet service provider equipment supplier Arris Networks, Inc. in 1995, the goal was to make a significant impact on the Internet market. The company proved attractive enough for Cascade Communications Corp. to pay $143 million for it, but that wasn't really the kind of impact Wu had in mind.

So now he's giving it another shot with a start-up called ArrowPoint Communications, which will deliver a "Web switch" in the first quarter. The offering is designed to ensure that companies hosting Web sites can handle ever-increasing hits on their servers.

The switch was engineered to take a load off overworked Web servers and get end-user requests handled faster by directing those requests to the most appropriate server.

The company's hook is that its devices will switch traffic based on requested content by looking at HTTP payload information, like a URL, instead of just identifying network addresses.

"We believe that we are fundamentally different because of our switch's content intelligence," says Wu, who conceived and designed the ArrowPoint device.

Among the switch's tasks is terminating HTTP and TCP/IP sessions. By some estimates, 40% of a server's CPU cycles can be chewed up on such communications processing. Wu says his company's switches will free up servers to better handle Web page caching as well as back-end file and database access.

Despite Wu's contention that the company's offering stands apart from other switches, ArrowPoint will have its work cut out making that clear to potential customers, given the slew of new switches and technologies flooding the market.

It wasn't long ago that vendors were differentiating their devices by touting Layer 3 technology for routing traffic at wire speeds. Now companies such as ArrowPoint and Alteon Networks, Inc. also are talking up Layer 4 switching, which involves speeding the transfer of similar flows of data, such as HTTP or File Transfer Protocol traffic.

The difference with ArrowPoint's device is that it switches flows by finding out what content is being requested by end users, Wu says. The switch then applies packet shaping, load balancing, firewall and other policies based on the nature of the content, he says.

Wu acknowledges that ArrowPoint's family of multilayer, multiservice switches likely will wind up competing for customer dollars against products from the likes of established players such as Check Point Software Technologies and Cisco Systems, Inc. Fortunately for ArrowPoint, the company is staffed by a slew of internetwork industry veterans formerly with companies such as Arris, 3Com Corp. and Xyplex, Inc.

And Wu says there is plenty of business to go around.

"More than a million new Web sites are going up every year," he says. "If we can penetrate even a small percentage of those, we'll do well."

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