What's the use of having multiple data centers if there's not an intelligent way to route the user to the best site? While DNS can point a user to a data center, BIG-IP Global Traffic Manager (GTM) can automatically direct users to the closest or best-performing data center. You can realize the full potential of multiple data centers by using BIG-IP GTM to provide seamless disaster recovery and routing based on quality of service or business criteria. When users try to access a data center that is overloaded or unreachable, BIG-IP Global Traffic Manager automatically and seamlessly directs them to a secondary data center. The user isn't even aware of the switch: they could be accessing a data center at corporate headquarters, in another city, or on another continent. This capability makes BIG-IP GTM especially important for enterprises that need to maintain operations in the event of a natural disaster, power failure, or any other large-scale service disruption. Distributed applications may rely on several Web servers, application servers, and databases that work in parallel. BIG-IP Global Traffic Manager automates the process of tracking and managing the dependencies between individual application services, helping to achieve high availability, persistence, and maintenance for these applications. It eliminates the guesswork, errors, and inefficiencies related to manual management, so you have a holistic framework to manage all application services across multiple sites. Global enterprises often have data centers spread throughout the world. So why send a user in Hong Kong to the Dallas data center when there's one in Singapore? BIG-IP Global Traffic Manager uses topology-based load balancing to inspect a user's IP and determine the most efficient data center. The topology could be based on continent, country, ISP, or custom IP subnet level.
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