ZXTM: Deploying Microsoft Outlook Web Access
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Microsoft Outlook Web Access (OWA) is commonly deployed to support mobile workers who need to access email, calendaring, task and contact information from a web-based client. These services are often business-critical, and a lack of availability may affect the productivity of large numbers of workers.
ZXTM can be used to improve the availability of Microsoft Outlook Web Access. The simple configuration steps to do so are described in the deployment guide.
Why manage your network traffic using ZXTM?
- Improved Availability: ZXTM is able to make your OWA 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 OWA, 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 OWA, 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 OWA 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 GENERIC 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 OWA 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 improves application performance by:
- Reducing the number of concurrent connections and transactions the OWA server must handle, using a combination of network optimizations: low-level TCP offload, TCP acceleration, HTTP connection multiplexing and HTTP connection reuse. ZXTM changes the environment that the GENERIC server operates in, from large numbers of slow, remote clients to a very small number of fast local ones.
- Reducing the total number of transactions the OWA server processes by sophisticated context-sensitive content caching.
- Offloading compute-intensive tasks such as SSL decryption, content compression and XML processing onto ZXTM’s high performance software engines.
- Utilizing performance-sensitive load balancing, routing each transaction to the OWA server best suited to handle it (based on cache history, current server performance and current server workload).
Security
Total server isolation, request and response scrubbing, request validation and request rate shaping help to place your OWA 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 an OWA server out of service without interrupting any ongoing transactions or sessions for routine maintenance or redeployment.
Technical Notes
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