Zeus Traffic Manager 6.0

Quick Links

- What is Zeus Traffic Manager?
- Reduce operational lock-in
- Massive, yet cost-effective scalability
- Unrivalled power and sophistication
- What our customers say about Zeus Traffic Manager 6.0
- What the Analysts say
- Zeus Traffic Manager 6.0 Presentation

The Zeus Traffic Manager is a sophisticated application traffic management software solution that allows organizations to visualize and manipulate the flow of traffic to their web-enabled applications, ensuring a consistently robust web infrastructure.

The market-leading Zeus Traffic Manager or Application Delivery Controller (ADC) is used by small and large organizations to manage traffic to their online applications. It is the only pure software ADC available and Zeus have been identified as a “Visionary” in Gartner’s most recent Magic Quadrant for Application Delivery Controllers (September 2009).

What is Zeus Traffic Manager?

Zeus Traffic Manager 6.0 is the next release (October 2009) of the Zeus Traffic Manager product line. It adds significant new features, particularly relevant to enterprises with complex deployment environments and traffic management requirements.

In addition, a large number of incremental improvements make Zeus Traffic Manager more powerful and easier to use for all customers.

Our latest software is also now available on a number of new platforms, including Amazon EC2 (as a fully-supported Amazon Machine Instance), Xen/OracleVM (as a complete Virtual Appliance), VMware vSphere (as a complete Virtual Appliance) and OpenSolaris (software).

Zeus Traffic Manager actively manages network traffic to and from networked applications

Most importantly, Zeus Traffic Manager includes a uniquely-powerful scripting language named TrafficScript.

TrafficScript rules can implement almost any conceivable traffic management policy, making it very easy for an administrator to configure Zeus Traffic Manager to the precise and unique requirements of his application.

Reduce operational lock-in

Zeus reduces operational lock-in by offering you more choice in how you manage and deploy your web-based services.

Multiple APIs and administration methods (a new Command Line Interface in version 6) make it easier to align the management of Zeus Traffic Manager with your current operational practices.
Support for multiple platforms (version 6.0 adds support for Amazon EC2, OpenSolaris and virtual appliances for VMware vSphere, XenServer, Xen and OracleVM). Host your services and applications in almost any physical, virtual or cloud-based datacenter.

Massive, yet cost-effective scalability

Begin with the solution that fits your need, then upgrade to enable new features and additional performance when required. Features and capacity upgrades are unlocked by license key, without any interruption in service.
Version 6 adds:

Multi-Hosted Traffic IP Addresses allows any number of Zeus Traffic Managers (up to 64) to share traffic directed to a single IP address in active-active mode. Traffic Managers can be added or removed with no disruption to existing infrastructure.
Cost-Effective Pricing to upgrade performance or functionality at cost, and monthly/hourly pricing on supported clouds and managed service platforms.

Unrivalled power and sophistication

For enterprise and web 2.0 applications, new capabilities in Zeus Traffic Manager 6 include:

Content Caching to solid-state disks greatly improves the performance of content-heavy services;
Per-connection bandwidth control for fine-grained bandwidth management;
Geo-location capabilities make it simple to identify the location of users and create location-sensitive traffic management policies;
Efficient management of large data streams makes it possible to handle many more concurrent user sessions when performing content manipulation;
Detailed fault logging and diagnosis, improved health monitoring and centralized logging reduce operational costs and time-to-fix;
Integration with enterprise user management systems for streamlined admin access control;
Usability improvements include a new TrafficScript code editor and the ability to quickly manage large sets of rules, and a new command line interface.

What our customers say about Zeus Traffic Manager 6.0

“With Zeus Traffic Manager 6.0, we can manage traffic on our terms and help ensure a balanced, smooth traffic-flow even during peak periods like our TV event for Red Nose Day.”

Charlotte Melén, Web Technology Manager at Comic Relief

"At Netic, we use Zeus software as the heart in our complex hosting environment. The Zeus Traffic Manager handles almost all incoming and outgoing traffic and is used extensible to fine tune security, performance, encryption and quality of service. We have built our entire hosting complex around the Zeus Traffic Manager functionality and with the Zeus software in the central spot, we can grow and still be very agile to our customers in changes and new set-ups. There is really no way I could imagine doing modern hosting without the Zeus Traffic Manager functionality.

The new Zeus Traffic Manager 6.0 release offers many new enhancements and new functionality and it is great to see, how fast Zeus is moving forward. We use TrafficScript™ extensively and the new enhancements are very welcome and offer some very nice additions like geolocation. The new streaming of responses will offer a dramatic improvement in performance on quite a few of our Service Orientated Architecture (SOA) endpoints and the enhanced caching will benefit all our websites in performance as well. The new Command Line Interface (CLI) will make it easier for us to automate new deployments and day-to-day maintenance."

Karsten Thygesen, CTO, Netic

“We have been beta testing the forthcoming release of Zeus Traffic Manager 6.0 in our lab environment as traditional OS and VM appliance deployments. It is clear that Zeus is listening to its customers and has responded with features and enhancements that strengthen the product and simplify its administration. We were delighted to see that there have been significant functionality improvements including true load balancing of a single IP, disk backed caching, enhanced TrafficScript™ and rules management. We can see a number of areas where this new functionality will be utilised to enhance client’s service.”

Antony Joyce Technical Architect, ioko

“We’ve been using the Zeus Traffic Manager for some time and have been impressed with its performance and scalability. We use Amazon EC2 extensively and the release of Zeus Traffic Manager 6.0 as an Amazon AMI has made the integration and management with EC2 even easier. Zeus is significantly ahead of the competition in the Cloud space giving us the flexibility we need to ensure our services have 100% uptime.”

Jim Brown, Cloudmade

“We’ve been a customer for several years and particularly like the availability of the Zeus software as a VMware Virtual Appliance. We use Zeus to load balance web traffic and to load balance custom-written Windows services in our application service tier. The recent major software release from Zeus has provided us with a rich set of new features. SnagAJob.com has particularly benefited from the ability to easily script processes, enabling us to further automate maintenance and code release deployment procedures. It is an easy to use and cost-effective solution. Zeus exceeds our web application infrastructure needs for flexibility, reliability and performance, providing our customers with the excellent online web service that they have come to expect.“

Matt Reidy, Director of IT Operations, SnagAJob.com

"Zeus Traffic Manager fits the Cloud model perfectly. It allows Virtacore to quickly and efficiently scale up or down based on what our customers need without having to rip and replace hardware. Zeus Traffic Manager is more than a standard load balancer. It has exceptional application, firewall and layer-7 control capabilities. Virtacore is deploying Zeus software instead of expensive hardware appliances. We can easily install or migrate it live to hardware for a solution that typically out-performs anything we can get from other vendors. Zeus Traffic Manager helps us control our destiny by controlling the underlying hardware and layer-7 feautures we need for next generation traffic management."

Tom Kiblin, Founder & CEO, Virtacore Systems, Inc.

Zeus Technology named a ‘visionary’ by Leading Analyst Firm

Zeus has been positioned in the ‘Visionaries’ quadrant of the 2009 Application Delivery Controller (ADC) Gartner Magic Quadrant.*

The Magic Quadrant for ADC 2009 examines vendors that provide solutions that improve the delivery of applications over networks. It evaluates a vendor’s overall viability, market responsiveness and customer experience, among other criteria.

Paul Brennan, CEO, Zeus Technology says, “Zeus was the first in the market to deliver a SoftADC solution with flexible licensing suitable for Cloud hosting centres, application developers and a range of enterprise solutions. Zeus software demonstrates excellent price/performance on industry standard hardware, particularly SUN/Solaris. This puts the company in a perfect position to offer enterprises a highly scalable application delivery controller which can be deployed within any Virtual or Cloud Computing environment.

Brennan continues, “In my opinion, to have Gartner recognize Zeus is a testament to our customer-centric approach and ability to support businesses as they move into the next era of computing. I am looking forward to seeing more interest in Zeus from the industry throughout 2010.”

*Gartner, Inc. Magic Quadrant for Application Delivery Controllers, by Mark Fabbi and Joe Skorupa, Sept. 24, 2009

Butler Group technical audit of Zeus Traffic Manager 6.0

Zeus Traffic Manager combines load balancing and application traffic management, and has achieved what the company set out to do. As a versatile software solution that leverages inexpensive hardware, and scales cost-effectively, Ovum Butler Group believes that Zeus Traffic Manager should be considered by enterprises and data centres seeking to improve the management of application traffic, both internal and Web-related.

To see the full report please click here

451 Group: Zeus Traffic Manager Market Development Report

451 Group have published a Market Development Report for the release of Traffic Manager 6.0

To see the full report please click here