Acme WebSystems' Network
Acme WebSystems, Inc. has eight large multiprocessor web servers. The first five web servers deliver corporate and product information and also serve as FTP servers. The last three servers are used exclusively as E-commerce servers. The company has a single T3 connection (45 Mbit/s) to the web through a high end router and all of the web servers are connected to a dedicated port on a fast ethernet switch. The WAN connection is only partially utilized while the servers are highly utilized. The high end router is providing a basic round robin algorithm to distribute traffic between the servers. However, there is no intelligence to the round robin algorithm (a dead server would still be sent packets) and performance problems still occur.Current Performance Problems
Often times, the web servers respond very slowly due to heavy usage. The e-commerce servers use SSL when processing purchases and customers often complain that they were unable to complete their transaction due to slow performance. It is also very time consuming for the MIS personnel to keep all of the servers updated with the latest HTLM code and this results in error when a server misses an update.Solution Requirements
Acme WebSystems is looking for a networking device (either software or hardware) that will allow the incoming networking traffic to be intelligently directed to a server based on some important server characteristics. The overall performance of the eight web servers should be improved. It should be possible to send traffic to the servers based upon the following measurements:- Server with the least connections
- Best server response time (lowest response time)
- Servers below x% CPU utilization
- Sent to a server based on Traffic type (HTTP traffic , FTPs and SSL to the E-Commerce servers
ArrowPoint
Coyote Point
Foundry
IPivot
WebSpective
RELATED LINKS
This RFP was prepared by The Tolly Group
Vendor responses:
ArrowPoint
Coyote Point
Foundry
IPivot
Resonate
WebSpective
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