Startups getting large pieces of actions. Yahoo and AOL are both big accounts. CSCO is no where to be seen. This will very likely impact the CAT 5000/6000 sales and CSCO had said in the last two qtrs form 10Q that CAT swicthes were one of the key revenue generators. (see FORM 10Q). What will happen when more and mroe customers go with the startups, YHOO and AOL did. Looks like they had tested many vendors and went with the best ones. What this means is that the revenue can suddenly dry up for CSCO. all imo.
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March 15, 1999, Issue: 756
Section: News & Analysis
Portals Provide Layer 4 Acid Test
John Fontana
Web portal Yahoo has turned to Layer 4 switching to handle escalating traffic
volumes, further validating the intelligent load-balancing technology for
heavy-duty e-business.
Yahoo will announce this week that it has installed 12 Layer 4 switches from
Alteon Networks Inc. to manage the load for nearly 70 servers that support
its Yahoo.Mail application, the fastest-growing service on its megasite.
The Alteon ACESwitch 180s, which replace DNS round-robin servers, let
Yahoo distribute traffic based on the size of individual servers, dynamically
work around crashes and swap out disabled servers. In contrast, DNS
round-robin servers hand traffic to servers sequentially, regardless of their
workload or whether they're functioning.
"Layer 4 switching makes our services more manageable, reliable, robust and
flexible," said Geoff Ralston, vice president of engineering at Yahoo. "If a
server crashes at 3 a.m., it's no big deal. The switch will balance across the
other boxes."
Web portals are among the pioneer users of load-balancing devices. America
Online last month installed Layer 4 switches from Foundry Networks Inc. to
handle growing traffic volumes (InternetWeek, Feb. 8), while start-up
communications portal Visitalk went with Alteon devices.
But IT managers grappling with proliferating Web applications, Web-to-host
gateways and e-commerce traffic also stand to benefit. Layer 4 switching,
which includes load balancing, traffic shaping, bandwidth allocation and other
features for controlling the flow of Web traffic, is emerging as a key
technology for ensuring that enterprise intranets and extranets perform reliably.
Within three years, enterprises will be the biggest market for Layer 4 switches
and other Internet traffic management (ITM) devices and will spend more than
$400 million on these products, according to Collaborative Research (see
chart on page 44). The total ITM market, which includes sales to Web portals
and other service providers, will reach $827 million by 2002, Collaborative
said.
"Load balancing is dollars and cents to us," said Norman Dee, director of
network services at 1-800-Flowers, which uses IPivot Inc.'s Intelligent
Broker device to balance traffic loads on its Web transaction servers. "You
had this type of functionality with the mainframe and floating channels, and
now it is coming to the interactive Web world," Dee said.
The company's Bloomlink system, used to place orders with member florists
worldwide, couldn't function without load balancing, Dee said, since each
florist must stay on one server for the length of a transaction. 1-800-Flowers
transacts roughly 70 percent of its sales volume over Bloomlink.
International Commerce Exchange Systems Inc., which operates an online
mall and a number of database-driven Web applications, also plans to install
Layer 4 switching when it begins to run individual applications on more than
one server, said MIS director Nate Weiss.
The bottom line is that as enterprises embrace Web technology, IT managers
must take steps to ensure performance and reliability.
"The use of Web apps and Web front ends on apps like ERP is getting larger
and larger-especially for successful enterprises-and Layer 4 switching will be
needed," said Robin Layland, president of Layland Consulting. "AOL learned
this the hard way. It went through this in a bad way."
The lesson of AOL's past network woes is that Layer 4 and other ITM
devices aren't a Band-Aid for existing problems.
"What IT managers have to understand is that they need to get ITM installed
before their Web configurations blow up," said Peter Christy, a co-author of
the Collaborative study.
Ralston called Yahoo's decision to upgrade "a proactive move to brace
against a service that one day may support hundreds of millions of users."
Yahoo wouldn't comment on the cost of its upgrade, but each Alteon switch
carries a base price of $14,995. If the switches deliver as promised, Ralston
said, Yahoo will install Layer 4 devices to support all of its services, including
directory and calendaring.
According to the study, the prevailing belief among enterprises is that if Layer
4 switching is "good enough for Yahoo, it's good enough for me."
Each Alteon switch gives Yahoo a gigabit-speed backplane and built-in
routing, letting the user isolate portions of its network and make them easier to
manage, Ralston said. The switches also allow for class-of-service
mechanisms-establishing priority based on users or requested information-that
may factor into future Yahoo services, though the company would not
elaborate.
For now, Yahoo is using the switches solely for load balancing, which spreads
traffic evenly across servers, but Alteon in the next two months will release
technology that supports traffic redirection using URLs buried in IP packets.
Redirection allows requests for dynamic content to be directed at servers
while requests for static content are sent to a cache device. The switches also
can be used to control bandwidth allocation and user-based access, and they
can tie into policy-based networking, said Dave Logan, switch architect at
Alteon.
Other vendors are adding the same types of features to their products.
Foundry, IPivot and Nortel Networks all will make announcements this week
that will bring URL redirection to their products.
IPivot and Nortel, which is an OEM for IPivot's gear, also will add the ability
to check outgoing traffic as well as inbound requests until an acceptable
response can be had. IPivot said that feature will be key in e-commerce
deployments where the inability to return a relevant response could result in
lost business.
Copyright ® 1999 CMP Media Inc.
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