Some more on Alteon:
[go to urls for graphs]
"Alteon revs WebOS with URL-based load balancing"
By Paula Musich, PC Week
URL: www5.zdnet.com
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"What's so great about URL switching?"
By Pankaj Chowdhry, PC Week Labs, PC Week
September 12, 1999 9:00 PM PT
URL: zdnet.com
Although some companies may just be catching up with IP switching, cutting-edge companies have moved on to URL switching, offered by vendors such as Alteon WebSystems Inc. and ArrowPoint Communications Inc.
This new breed of content switch—such as the $13,000 Ace Director 3 that PC Week Labs tested and that Alteon plans to release this week (see related story)—will allow companies to manage Web content in much more flexible ways. For instance, the cookie in a URL could be used to direct a request to a specific server.
Content switching will also enable more effective use of Web caches. By looking at the type of content requested in a URL, a content switch can direct static pages to a Web cache, while dynamic content is served directly from the Web servers.
URL switching also simplifies capacity planning because "hot" content can be easily segregated and attended to.
In tests of Alteon's AceDirector 3 and of ArrowPoint's $16,000 CS-100—the only other competitor—their differing architectures had a significant impact on performance.
Using 300 clients and seven servers, we were able to switch 37,000 URLs per second using Alteon's AceDirector 3 vs. 7,000 connections per second with the Arrow Point CS-100. The huge difference in performance is probably due to the distributed ASIC (application-specific integrated circuit)-based architecture used in the AceDirector device.
The CS-100 becomes a serious bottleneck if HTTP 1.0 is used. When we converted test clients to HTTP 1.0, the CS-100 dropped to about 1,700 requests per second, which makes it almost unusable. We saw a similar performance drop with the AceDirector 3, down to about 7,000 requests per second per port.
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