The Acme WebSystems' configuration is typical of those that we have seen at other customers' sites. We propose that Acme take advantage of a recently announced IPivot product: the Commerce Director 8000. This appliance was designed specifically to improve the reliability and performance of sites that not only serve up content but are also involved in e-commerce and/or encrypted traffic.
The Commerce Director 8000 combines the advanced bi-directional Layer 7 load balancing capability of our 7000 series with the SSL acceleration capabilities of our Commerce Accelerator 1000 that last month won Best of Show at Network + Interop in Las Vegas. In fact, the Commerce Director 8000 is three times more powerful than the Commerce Accelerator 1000 and typically increases your SSL handling capability by up to 150 fold (not 150% we really do mean 150 times). Without SSL acceleration we are seeing even large Sun Enterprise E450 servers that can normally handle over 300 connections per second of http (un-encrypted traffic) slow to a crawl. Analysts at Networkshop (www.networkshop.ca) have confirmed that performance drops to just three connections per second and CPU load rises to 100% when handling SSL traffic-which explains why your customers are already complaining. The Commerce Director 8000 typically handles 600 connections per second. We have seen the resultant CPU load on each server drop to just 3%, thus your servers can once again do what they do well, i.e., deliver content and execute database lookups and the like. To the best of our knowledge, IPivot is the only company providing SSL acceleration together with intelligent load balancing in one product. Two advantages of offloading encryption and decryption are that it enables you to monitor not only the requests coming into your server farm, but also the errors that might be generated by a server.The Commerce Director 8000 will diagnose a wide range of error messages that servers embed in their html pages. Your users should never see another 404 "File Not Found" or 403 "Server Too Busy" error message from following links on your site. If such an error is detected, the Commerce Director 8000 transparently rolls back the session and restarts the request on a different server-without the end-user ever knowing. Another unique feature of the Commerce Director 8000 is its ability to prioritize requests. By replicating content across all eight servers, the Commerce Director can dynamically decide how many should handle say, https versus http, versus ftp requests based on the actual response times your clients are seeing. Thus if some extremely successful marketing campaign resulted in more people wanting to buy versus browse, you could establish a rule that your https response times will remain under 50ms. If response times exceed 50ms, the Commerce Director 8000 dynamically brings into service more servers to handle https, thus eliminating the current artificial ceiling of three servers. The Commerce Director 8000 not only monitors every request for correct completion, it also monitors the average response time for each "class of requests." The best server is always selected according to response time rather than relying on proxies like Least Number of Connections or % CPU Utilization. This is desirable because all requests are not created equal-a large ftp transfer or a particularly heavy cgi request can greatly affect server performance. The only true way to guarantee great response times is to actually measure them. We recommend that you invest in two Commerce Director 8000s to ensure reliability. And if your router supports equal-cost symmetrical multipathing you will be able to configure them to handle requests simultaneously, i.e., run in a true live-live rather than live-standby mode, therefore maximizing your performance. Each Commerce Director 8000 costs $39,995 and you will quickly recover this investment because you will now need only one server rather than the three you currently have dedicated to SSL traffic. Only one element of your RFP is not directly addressed by the Commerce Director 8000 solution, as we do not provide the means to replicate data across servers. We recommend however that you look at synchronization offerings from companies like WebSpective http://www.webspective.com. Please find below a more detailed tabular version of your requests and our response to your RFP.|
Acme WebSystems' Request |
IPivot Response |
|
Load Balance 5 HTTP Servers |
Yes. |
| Load Balance 5 FTP Servers | Yes. |
| Load Balance 3 HTTPS ( SSL) Servers | Yes. |
|
100BaseT |
Yes. Auto-senses 10/100 BaseT. |
| Dead Server Detection |
Yes. Dead servers are detected upon the first SYN-ACK not returned. Upon detection, the session is rolled back and forwarded to the next available server. |
| SSL performance issues |
The IPivot CD8000 was specifically designed to offload the heavy process of SSL encryption and decryption. The IPIVOT CD8000 handles all decryption and clear text is sent to the server farm. This ensures that the servers are never bogged down by SSL hits. With the IPivot CD8000, the servers dedicated to SSL traffic could be reduced to one because it can handle 150 times the load. |
| Server Replication |
We recommend looking at WebSpective's offering. |
|
Least Connections/ Response Time/ % CPU Utilization |
The IPivot CD8000 maintains a history of responses to and from each server. This is used to select the destination of the next incoming packet. Through this method, IPivot can ensure that the fastest server will always be preferred and that no one server will receive more data than it is capable of processing. |
|
Traffic Type (HTTP, FTP, SSL) |
The IPivot CD8000 differentiates all traffic based on type and forwards it to the appropriate server. It also supports the segmentation of the request right down to the URL level—so requests for starr_report.html could be sent to a different set of servers if the response times became too great. |
| Content Verification |
The IPivot CD8000 uses its Intelligent Session Recovery to detect mismatches between content requested and content available. Upon detection, an SNMP trap can be sent to one of several content verification packages (Webspective, SandPiper, etc) to take the appropriate action. |
| NAT |
The IPivot CD8000 performs NAT translation, converting the advertised Virtual IP address of the site to individual server addresses. Servers can be on a routable or non-routable network. |
| Solaris Servers |
The IPivot CD8000 supports all server platforms and operating systems. No software need be added to any servers. If you later decide to add NT servers or servers of different capacities the CD 8000 will automatically work out their appropriate weight to maintain the best response times—no manual weighting is required. |