ZXTM: Deploying Apache
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The Apache Web Server is the Internet's most popular open-source web server software, as a result of its maturity, free distribution and the enormous range of community-supported modules.
Using ZXTM to load balance traffic across a cluster of Apache servers, you can improve the availability (uptime), security and ease of management of the servers. ZXTM's connection handling expertise can dramatically improve the performance and capacity of your Apache-based web applications.
Why manage your network traffic using ZXTM?
- Improved Availability: ZXTM is able to make your Apache deployment more reliable and available, reducing downtime due to routine maintenance and unanticipated failures.
- Better performance: The unique application acceleration features will improve the end-user performance of Apache, and increase its capacity, giving you a much better return on your software and infrastructure investment.
- More secure: Acting as a ‘gatekeeper’, ZXTM delivers improved security as a line of defence for Apache, protecting against flash floods and inspecting and filtering all incoming and outgoing traffic.
- Simplified management: Complete traffic inspection and a powerful configuration language let you build sophisticated traffic management policies to manage traffic across large clusters, reduce operational costs and build an efficient, flexible and highly scalable application infrastructure.
In more detail
Reliability
ZXTM provides a single point-of-entry to a cluster of Apache servers. With a combination of passive and active health monitoring and performance measurements, ZXTM can route incoming requests to the fastest-responding servers and avoid servers that are failed or underperforming.
Request rate shaping ensures that your Apache servers can never be overloaded with requests, and advanced Session Persistence reliably pins users' sessions to individual servers for maximum reliability.
Acceleration
ZXTM's Application Acceleration capabilities improve the end-user experience and increase the capacity of your Apache servers to handle transactions. Indirectly, it also increases their resistance to denial of service attacks and reduces downtime due to flash floods and unexpected high traffic volumes.
ZXTM has been proven to:
- Manage Keepalives on Apache's behalf to give even and consistent levels of service.
- Totally eliminate errors, and give an increase of up to 18-times the sustained transaction rate.
- Provide up to 20 times the SSL transaction rate and 20-times faster transactions, with no connection errors.
- Almost totally eliminate high-latency effects, giving up to 40-times better utilization, and 8-times faster transaction times.
Read the Broadband Testing report.
Security
Total server isolation, request and response scrubbing, request validation and request rate shaping help to place your Apache servers in as secure an environment as possible, protecting them from direct attacks from internet clients, invalid or malformed HTTP requests and malicious or incidental flash floods that would severely impact the levels of service you provide.
Management
ZXTM's advanced request routing and manipulation, driven by a fully programmable TrafficScript rules engine, gives you full flexibility to manage both your network traffic and server resources.
Connection draining makes application upgrades a snap. You can safely take a Apache server out of service without interrupting any ongoing transactions or sessions for routine maintenance or redeployment.
Technical Notes
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