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Web Optimization and Acceleration

As enterprises migrate business-critical applications to the Web, they are realizing that Web protocols can introduce performance bottlenecks and impose significant overhead on servers. Use of secure Web protocols based on SSL compounds the performance challenge. Brocade ServerIron solutions provide a wide range of network-based acceleration and optimization technologies to increase the performance, scalability, and security of Web-enabled enterprise, e-commerce, and content provider applications.

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Web-enabled IP applications are at the heart of economic activity, and their availability, performance and response time immensely affect the productivity and profits of various organizations around the globe. Traditionally, these mission-critical applications are implemented on servers running different types of operating systems like UNIX, Windows and Linux. Using standardized server and OS platforms to build and implement IP applications gives deployment flexibility, eases management and maintenance, and reduces the total cost of ownership. While the new server technology kept pace with Moore's law and offers increased performance year-over-year, OS implementation complexities still remain and limit servers performance, which is adversely impacted by the inefficient connection management between clients and application servers. Even with the benefits of Moore's law for newer servers, the "installed base" of server and application infrastructure continues to be dogged by poor performance. Studies show that 30 to 40% of the server resources are used for connection management and other overhead, which severely limits application response time, scalability and availability. When SSL based secure Web transactions that are widely used in sensitive ERP, e-commerce and financial applications are added to the server, their performance slows significantly and has noticeable user response time impact.

Offloading SSL processing and connection management overhead from the application servers immediately increases the available server capacity to handle application transactions more effectively. It also provides robust security to server and application infrastructure by eliminating direct contact from outside users to the server farm. Recovering and redeploying server resources for the real purpose of supporting application traffic will protect investment in server farms and increase the ROI (Return on Investment).

Brocade ServerIron switches support "Server Connection Offload" solution (other terms like connection pooling and http multiplexing are also used to define this solution). By implementing this function on the ServerIron switch, network and application managers can increase available capacity of the server infrastructure, and simultaneously take advantage of the application and server farm security and scalability capabilities inherent in the ServerIron. The ServerIron switch front ends the server farm to minimize connection management overhead on the servers by utilizing the new HTTP1.1 protocol to switch traffic from many client-side connections to a few server-side connections. By maintaining an optimal ratio of client-side to server-side connections, the load balancers ensure that the application performance and server utilization is maximized.

Web application proliferation and increasing need for securing Web transactions is driving the growth in SSL-enabled Web delivery. Secure Web transactions add tremendous processing overhead to servers, which degrades server performance, response time and server capacity. The ServerIron switches offer an ideal solution for high availability SSL acceleration and application traffic management for Web services. These switches offload SSL processing from servers and centralize certificate management for added security and simplified operations. SSL-enabled ServerIron switches terminate all SSL connections, and decrypt traffic prior to sending it towards the servers. The switches convert SSL-encrypted requests into clear-text HTTP and forward to Web servers. Reply traffic from the servers is sent through the switch for encryption on the way back to the client. Because the SSL traffic is converted to visible clear text in the network, security filters and policies at Layer 7 may be applied to this traffic for added security.

ServerIron web acceleration and optimization solution also includes many application-level switching and management features to help simplify content delivery and enhance application security. All these features are an integral part of a common TrafficWorks OS.

Web Optimization and Acceleration Resources

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Abstract:

The Brocade ADX 1000 Series can be quickly upgraded in the field using software keys. This allows organizations to enable a full suite of hardware and software options when needed without disabling the system, which can disrupt service.

Abstract:

Brocade’s ServerIron ADX with Application Resource Broker (ARB) automates on-demand resource provisioning with visibility into application traffic and load level. To demonstrate the on-demand computing services provided by ARB, Brocade, SAP, and VMware have jointly defined a virtualized application reference architecture for the SAP BusinessObjects BI platform that closely models the customer deployment environment.

Abstract:

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) adoption has resulted in the increased service-enabling of IT systems. Now, Brocade® and Oracle offer a complete solution for the rapid deployment of business applications on an SOA foundation. Brocade® ServerIron® ADX has been validated with Oracle Fusion Middleware (FMW) SOA Suite 11g to deliver scalability and resiliancy, ensuring the highest availability of business application services.

Abstract:

The flexibility and simplified high availability of Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 come from innovations to the core Exchange Server 2010 platform, enhancing performance, scalability, and reliability, while reducing TCO.

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The combination of Brocade ServerIron Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) and Nominum Caching/Authoritative Name Servers (CNS/ANS) provides the solution of choice for highly resilient and scalable DNS service infrastructures used by the largest service providers.

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Brocade® ServerIron® ADX delivers EMC RSA Key Manager scalability and resiliancy, ensuring high availability of key management services for data encryption applications.

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Provides best-practice guidance for mission-critical enterprise application delivery, showing how to improve network access performance for WAN deployments of Microsoft SharePoint 2010 using Brocade ServerIron and Blue Coat ProxySG.

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The ServerIron EM Plug-in significantly reduces the cost and complexity of managing applications that rely on ServerIron ADX and Oracle technologies

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Discusses joint implementation of Brocade ServerIron application delivery switches with IBM WebSphere SIP servers. It provides guidelines for installations and step-by-step instructions for configuring Brocade ServerIron switches for load balancing of SIP servers.

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Brocade and SAP jointly present how modern application and network technologies could be combined to form productive SAP business application landscapes, which perform well and securely when used globally.

Abstract:

Highlights the value of highly available and scalable application switching and details the specialized capabilities required in the application switches for deployment in a SIP service infrastructure for maximum benefit.

Abstract:

Brocade’s ServerIron ADX with Application Resource Broker (ARB) automates on-demand resource provisioning with visibility into application traffic and load level. To demonstrate the on-demand computing services provided by ARB, Brocade, SAP, and VMware have jointly defined a virtualized application reference architecture for the SAP BusinessObjects BI platform that closely models the customer deployment environment.

Abstract:

The transition from the IPv4 protocol to the IPv6 protocol represents a significant challenge to service providers, hosting services, and other companies. They must find ways to accommodate end users and Customer-Premises Equipment (CPE) devices that may be using either protocol. This white paper examines four transition technologies. Brocade is offering its customers a transition path to the new wave of Internet technologies while continuing to utilize customers’ existing infrastructure.