Looking ahead

Near-term advances will focus on improving each device's overall ability to check the health of an application.

F5 Networks plans to enrich its ability to control traffic so that users create localized custom topologies. IT managers can route traffic on a country level, but soon will be able to drill down on a more specific geographical level, says Jason Needham, a product manager at F5.

The company also will improve its "persistence" features, which control the ability to make sure users who input data on one screen can be routed back to those locations. This is particularly important in a financial application, when a customer fills out an online credit card profile, for example. The ability to synchronize that data with other data centers in real time is something that F5 will address this quarter.

Cisco also will improve the geographic accuracy of where content is best reached for fastest response. In particular, companies will be able to update a database to identify content that is cached on a particular local device and not just at an origin server.

But the next challenge will occur when corporations want to conduct fulfillment activities out of multiple servers across more than one data center. That will make it necessary to synchronize databases across the company, says Thomas Nolle of the CIMI Group and a Network World columnist.

"Most applications today are designed to load balance a display-only Web server, rather than really support load balanced e-commerce where there is a transaction and not just a cataloged Web page," Nolle says. "But ultimately the value of an electronic catalog is limited if you cannot execute off of it."

There is a lot to distributed load balancing that has nothing to do with networks and everything to do with the overall framework of the applications, Nolle says.