Streaming-Video Hardware Gets Put To The Test
techweb.com
(10/28/99, 6:30 p.m. ET)
By Christine Zimmerman, InternetWeek
Foundry Networks is lending its load-balancing
switches to a Microsoft trial of streaming-video
applications, in an effort to demonstrate the
technology to support these
bandwidth-intensive applications has finally
arrived.
The two vendors are creating a multigigabit server farm,
for which Foundry's ServerIron switches serve two key
functions: direct server return and symmetric load
balancing.These features work in concert to speed up
response to user requests by first determining which
server in a farm is the most appropriate to process a
request, and then by sending the requested information
back to the user via the most direct path.
The Foundry-Microsoft test, starting next week at
Microsoft's Partner Solutions Center in Redmond,
Wash., is tailored for ISP and CLEC environments.
But the partnership is significant for enterprises for two
reasons: IT managers looking to support
bandwidth-intensive streaming-media aplications must
keep an eye on the latest network technologies; and, on
a more basic level, IT managers can look at the test to
evaluate the benefits of load-balancing switches to any
large server farm -- be it a group of Web servers,
e-mail servers, or a mix.
The infrastructure to support streaming media has a
ways to go before the applications go mainstream for
enterprises.
“It's really a toy today,” said Peter Christy, an analyst
with the Internet Research Group. “That's because of its
poor quality, excessive cost, and inability to scale to
commercial levels.”
But Christy maintained there's huge latent enterprise
demand for training, conferencing, and other
streaming-video applications.
For the ongoing Partner Solutions Center test,
Microsoft is using a handful of Windows NT servers --
20 by mid-November -- running InfoLibria's
streaming-media software. The server farm is
connected to the Internet via a Cisco Gigabit Ethernet
switch.
Two Foundry Layer 4 ServerIron switches are
connected to the gigabit switch, each working as a
virtual IP address. As requests come into the gigabit
switch, they're load-balanced by the Layer 4 switches
and sent to the appropriate servers.
Once a server looks at a request, it can bypass the
load-balancing ServerIron, sending the requested
information right back to the client via the gigabit switch.
This is direct server return, or out-of-path return. Direct
server return supports up to 1 million concurrent, active
user connections, and enables requested content to be
served by the best return path.
Microsoft is also looking to Foundry for the promise of
symmetric server load balancing, which means both the
Layer 4 switches are active and backing up each other.
This doubles the capacity of the server farm, offering up
to 2 million connections with full-service redundancy.
These features are critical to video streaming on
demand. But they're also important to e-commerce,
Web server farms, and other enterprise applications,
said Chandra Kopparapu, Layer 4 product marketing
manager at Foundry.
“The focus for corporations is building out the
infrastructure,” said Gary Schare, lead product manager
at Microsoft. “There's no reason this technology
couldn't be lent to the enterprise. It's just all about
scaling.”
Arco-Paypoint now uses Foundry ServerIrons as basic
switches on the company's Ethernet network. But
Arco-Paypoint, which processes point-of-sale
transactions for gas stations, said it plans to put the
load-balancing feature behind a Web server farm.
“It will be important to have that failover,” said Jaime
Cabrera, network support analyst at the company.
The Foundry ServerIron switch used in the test is an
8-port, 10/100-megabit-per-second auto-sensing unit,
and lists for $6,295. The 10/100 switch comes in 16-
and 24-port versions. IT managers can order two
additional gigabit uplinks, or the ServerIron strictly with
8-gigabit ports.
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