Microsoft Network Load Balancer

Special offer until August 31^st: Microsoft NLB users: Purchase one ZXTM license, get the second at a 50% discount.

Why upgrade to ZXTM?

ZXTM is a compelling and risk-free upgrade from Microsoft's Network Load Balancer. As well as enabling high-availability, ZXTM adds application health checking, intelligent load balancing, powerful session persistence and a range of optimization, security and visualization features.

ZXTM also includes the powerful TrafficScript™ rules language for inspecting, transforming and managing all types of client-server traffic, as well as advanced features like content caching, bandwidth and rate shaping and service level monitoring.

In more detail:

ZXTM LB adds the following capabilities to Microsoft NLB:

Application health checks verify that a server is functioning correctly, ranging from simple 'ping' tests to full response content checking.
Multiple load balancing methods, sensitive to server load and response times.
Request inspection, allowing different requests to be managed and routed in different ways.
Multiple session persistence methods based on source IP address, observed cookies, inserted cookies, SSL session ID; all methods can be applied selectively to just the requests that need them.
Security checking, testing that requests are well formed and that individual clients and groups of clients are not overloading the service with large volumes of traffic.
SSL decryption, TCP offload and HTTP multiplexing to improve server performance.
Connection draining, making it easy to manage and maintain servers.
Powerful traffic visualization, centralized logging and cluster-wide diagnostics.

ZXTM adds the following capabilities, in addition to ZXTM LB:

TrafficScript™ rules language. TrafficScript is a full programming language that can be used to configure sophisticated policies in ZXTM. These policies can control how ZXTM secures the traffic, inspects and rewrites requests and responses, and which features of ZXTM are used to handle each transaction.
Content Caching to improve performance by remembering common requests and responses;
Bandwidth Management to control the bandwidth used by different services and types of requests.
Request Rate Shaping to smooth spikes of traffic and limit the number of requests of different types that are admitted to the cluster.
Service Level Monitoring to monitor the end-user response time and adjust traffic management policies accordingly.

Customers who have benefited from ZXTM

Play.com is one of the UK's busiest e-retail stores, second only to Amazon.co.uk (source: IMRG-Hitwise Hot Shops, November 2006), and is one of the top 50 globally. They have been using ZXTM to manage traffic to www.play.com since 2004.

The challenge that faced them was to replace their existing Microsoft Network Load Balancers with a product that would allow them to scale up their e-commerce capacity on demand by as many servers as required, all without disrupting their services and hard-earned reputation. Play.com were concerned about site availability during the very busy peak times of business, particularly the weeks before Christmas.

Since ZXTM was deployed, there has been a major improvement to the performance and responsive times of the site.

As well as enabling us to provide our customers a better service with faster and more reliable delivery of our web content, ZXTM gives us the ability to plan for future growth by enabling us to simply scale up our infrastructure and introduce faster hardware as needed.

It's taken everything we have thrown at it so far.

David Turner, Systems Architect, PLAY.COM

Read the full story in the case study "PLAY.COM records dramatic improvements in online application speed with ZXTM".

Terms and Conditions

This 'purchase one license, get the second at a 50% discount' offer applies to ZXTM for Windows purchases that are shipped before or on August 31^st.

Browse our product section to find out more about ZXTM and download a free 30-day trial today.

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