More news. Not only is GBLX's system getting bigger, it's getting better. I still think someone will try to buyout the company. They had better hurry before we hit the 50's.
Fez
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ArrowPoint Supercharges Global Crossing Centers
(10/15/99, 5:36 p.m. ET)
By Christine Zimmerman, InternetWeek
Paul Santonelli, vice president of technology and applications in Global Crossing's Web hosting division, said he has seen every tool the market has to offer for load balancing Web traffic. And the bottom line from that experience? For extremely large content plays, load-balancing software, and specialized load-balancing appliances simply "don't work."
"If you're dealing with dozens of servers, you have to have the port density and scalability that only a load-balancing switch can provide," he said.
Santonelli should know. His company offers Web co-location for 40 percent of the top 100 Internet brands, including some of the largest and most densely trafficked sites on the Web, like Yahoo, The Motley Fool, Playboy, eToys, and USA Today.
Global Crossing's Web hosting division, formerly Frontier GlobalCenter, has put a number of vendors and a variety of products to the load-balancing test, including boxes from Cisco and F5 Networks, and Layer 4 switches from Alteon WebSystems. And the winner is ArrowPoint Communications, which will provide its CS-800 Web Switch to Global Crossing data centers across the country, officials said this week. The CS-800 supports up to 64 non-blocking, full-duplex 100 Base-TX ports, up to 16 100 Base-FX ports, and up to 32 gigabit Ethernet interfaces.
Global Crossing has already deployed three CS-800 switches at the company's mega-center facility, which comprises about 80,000 square feet, in Sunnyvale, Calif. The plan is to include additional deployment of two CS-800 Web Switches each in California, Virginia, New York, and various other Internet-attached data centers across Global Crossing's 20,000-mile fiber optic network. Global Crossing will also resell ArrowPoint's CS-100 and CS-800 switches, letting those customers outsource their e-mail servers. Global Crossing's own CS-800s will intelligently manage incoming Web mail connections.
The selection of ArrowPoint switches will let Global Crossing's Web hosting division offer additional new services, Santonelli said, though he would not elaborate.
But it's clear that content intelligence is what helped ArrowPoint convince Global Crossing.
"The CS-800 is the only shipping Web switch that can make decisions about where to send traffic," said Ervin Johnson, director of marketing for ArrowPoint.
ArrowPoint makes switching decisions based on URLs and cookies. The switches learn where specific content resides, either locally or remotely, and dynamically selects the best cache or Web server for content requests. The switch is also designed to optimize content delivery by using the best server located anywhere in a distributed network.
The CS-800 uses URL visibility to track content requests and identify flash crowds that are forming way before they can swamp servers. The switches then replicate "hot" content to reverse proxy caches. ArrowPoint said it is working on technology to refresh content on relocated sites, so information stays current.
Pricing for the switch starts at $17,995. |
