ZXTM Product Options
ZXTM (Zeus Extensible Traffic Manager) is a powerful Application Delivery Controller with many capabilities to inspect, manage, prioritize and accelerate application traffic.
It is available in software form, as virtual appliances and hardware appliances. It contains a number of optional features:
Web Content Caching
In most cases, the large majority of web requests are for simple objects that rarely change - images, stylesheets, HTML documents and other 'static' resources. Forwarding these duplicate requests to back-end web servers impacts site performance and capacity.
ZXTM's Content Caching stores common responses to web requests (HTTP and HTTPS) in an internal 'cache'. If several clients request the same data, requests can be served directly from the cache, avoiding excessive requests to the back-end server. ZXTM can cache in excess of 4Gb of content on 64-bit server platforms.
The content caching behavior conforms to the stipulations of the specification in RFC 2616, but can be fully customized and optimized using TrafficScript™ logic. ZXTM can store multiple variants of the same web resource, such as authenticated and un-authenticated views of a website page, and will cache compressed and uncompressed content separately for maximum performance. Detailed cache reports and activity charts help you understand and fine-tune how content is cached.
Benefits
- Reduces transaction load on back-end servers, increasing site capacity.
- Reduces latency by avoiding round-trips to back-end servers, increasing site performance.
- Fully customizable, supporting multiple content variants, so compatible with any web-based application.
Service Level Monitoring
Service response times are key metrics for service performance, and many organizations wish to impose and measure Service Level Agreements (SLAs) that define acceptable performance.
ZXTM's Service Level Monitoring allows you to measure these metrics and helps you to monitor and meet SLAs on your services:
- Service Level Monitoring records response times from individual nodes and service-wide, raising alerts if the response time of a service begins to fall outside of the desired limit.
- Real-time response times can be charted, or monitored using SNMP.
- Using TrafficScript™, ZXTM can modify the traffic management policies if a key service is running slowly, for example, by imposing a rate limit or bandwidth limit on non-critical traffic.
Service Level Monitoring can be controlled in very fine detail using TrafficScript. For example, ZXTM could monitor just the performance of shopping cart actions (insert, delete, lookup and checkout), and then limit the activities of casual visitors to the web site if the shopping cart subsystem is running too slowly.
Benefits
- Raises alerts when key services begin to underperform.
- Allows for traffic prioritization when services become overloaded (read more...).
- Helps in capacity planning.
- Diagnoses performance of individual nodes, detecting abnormal performance (for example, due to isolated software faults or runaway processes).
Bandwidth Management
Bandwidth is a key shared resource, and its misuse by one client or service can adversely affect the level of service that all other users experience.
ZXTM's Bandwidth Management is used to limit the amount of bandwidth that different services, types of transaction or groups of users can consume. For example, a low-priority service that hosts large file downloads could be limited so that it does not consume excessive bandwidth, even during a flash-flood event. Bandwidth Management can be fully controlled by TrafficScript™, allowing sophisticated policies such as 'limit visitors who are not logged in'.
Bandwidth limits are shared across a cluster of ZXTM Traffic Managers so that the total amount of traffic sent by the entire cluster does not exceed the configured limit. When multiple ZXTMs are active, they dynamically apportion and share the bandwidth limit between them based on client usage.
Benefits
- Limits bandwidth usage for services and types of transaction, controlling the effect of flash floods.
- Allows for traffic prioritization based on transaction or user type.
- Ensures that bandwidth usage does not exceed paid-for limits from the bandwidth supplier.
Bandwidth management is not available in he Solaris and FreeBSD versions of the ZXTM software.
Other options
ZXTM Load Balancer is an sophisticated Load Balancer, based on the core technology of ZXTM. Please refer to the Feature Comparison Matrix for details of the differences.
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