The gear behind the server

By April Jacobs
Network World Web Acceleration Newsletter, 12/19/01

Apart from the difficult business of making sure an e-commerce site runs smoothly, IT managers may have a new task on their hands as their companies start to make Web-enabled applications a core part of their infrastructure.

I recently spoke with the CEO of a company called Warp Solutions, which is focusing on gear that helps ensure Web-enabled applications run smoothly. Unlike most generic Web acceleration gear, which is designed to sit in front of a Web server, this company places its appliance behind a Web server and in front of an application server.

The main idea of acceleration appliances that sit in front of Web servers is to offload tasks from those servers to speed up response times to end users. On a traditional Web site, this scenario works well. Task-specific devices sit in front of the generic Web server so that those machines don't get bogged down with tasks like encryption processing, static content delivery, or dynamic page construction, all of which require lots of CPU processor power and I/O bandwidth.

But what happens when the requests coming in aren't just for content? What happens when those requests are for data tied to specific applications that users access to get their jobs done?

These types of requests require the application server to get involved. They also require gear that drills down into the request more deeply than traditional content requests, which might involve determining if it's a request for static, or dynamic content, or whether the request is from a premium subscriber, or a non-paying one.

A new breed of devices will emerge as vendors and users grapple with Web-enabled applications. These devices and the software that makes them intelligent will have to determine the type of application that a user is running and will have to allow network managers to set policies regarding access rights and prioritization of requests.