F5: Webserver Solutions
Web servers remain an integral part of enterprise network and e-commerce strategies. Web servers run critical applications and provide valuable content, revolutionizing the way that organizations provide information, services and products today. Employees, partners, clients and customers rely on the constant availability of the services and information provided by web servers. As the scope of the Internet and the integration of business alliances increase, so does the demand on web servers and the role they play in the success of the organization. Both large and small organizations face the challenge of deploying web sites and web applications while ensuring secure and optimized delivery of those applications. Choosing a cost effective solution that meets these challenges while allowing for growth is extremely important. Key challenges include: Increasing Security - Web site and network security have recently become both more complex and more crucial to web server deployments. New attacks such as cross-site scripting, parameter tampering, and SQL injection exploit holes in network security and application design, highlighting an organization’s need to increase application level security to assure resource availability. Improving ROI - A pattern of repeatedly acquiring the latest technology or frequently buying excess server capacity can ruin an organization’s operating margins - with little or no improvement in web applications performance and delivery. Organizations need scalable tools that monitor capacity and hardware that manages and redistributes access to server resources instantaneously and intelligently. Ensuring High Availability - Constant availability is a major concern for any enterprise deploying web servers, whether an e-commerce company relying on web applications for revenue, or a Services organization relying on information delivery over the Internet. Traditionally, clustering technology was implemented to ensure the availability of web servers. However, as usage increased and larger deployments became common, added network traffi c and limited health checking capabilities left organizations searching for more comprehensive solutions. Providing Scalability - Web servers are high-traffi c systems that need to provide consistent peak performance. Organizations seek technology that allows them to scale wisely, adding new servers as performance demands increase. Most web servers offer limited scalability through the use of clustering technology. However, in large deployments, the CPU-intensive processing that clustering places on the servers makes this solution impractical.
F5’s proven and widely deployed solutions allow organizations to increase the return on current investments and decrease the need for additional expenditure by providing flexible, intelligent distribution mechanisms to improve the performance and security of web servers and web applications. F5’s application traffic management products increase the existing benefi ts of deploying web servers by providing an easyto- use solution for optimizing, managing and securing global and local area traffic. For the remote workforce, the FirePass controller, F5’s award-winning SSL VPN device, ensures that employees and trusted partners can securely access web servers on the corporate network from any device in any location. The Traffic Shield web Application Firewall enhances deployments by protecting web servers at the application layer from general and targeted attacks, while allowing only valid and authorized application transactions on the network. With its comprehensive feature set, including Intelligent Compression, TCP Express, and Fast Cache, version 9 of the BIG-IP system can offload a number of different services from web servers, improving performance for the end user more than 70% and freeing the servers to perform their primary role: serving content. The BIG-IP system provides the industry’s most intelligent HTTP compression capabilities. Using the Universal Inspection Engine for deep packet inspection and the iRules policy-based engine, the BIG-IP device is able to selectively compress traffic based on an organization’s needs. These compression features help the enterprise realize large performance gains and bandwidth reduction, maximizing return on investment. The BIG-IP system further enhances web server deployments with TCP Express optimization features. Utilizing separate client and server side TCP stacks, TMOS independently optimizes the connection on both sides, improving end user performance for both broadband and dial-up clients while optimizing server-side data transmission. Organizations integrating the BIG-IP solution with web server deployments can achieve significant server connection offload with the memory-based caching module called Fast Cache. Fast Cache provides the flexibility and control needed to extend caching on a per application basis, adapting to an organization’s specialized caching needs and increasing end user performance for frequently accessed pages.
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