Integrated Application Acceleration
Application acceleration is a straightforward method of enhancing the performance of an existing application solution. It is a non-intrusive addition to a network, with little or no integration work required, and the benefits to the application server can be recognized rapidly.
This strategy is of particular benefit in large companies where separate teams manage network operations and application development. If network operations need to improve the application performance of the overall network, the low-risk deployment of application acceleration will achieve that end without impacting on the application development team.
Quick Links
- How does ZXTM accelerate my applications?
- Why do I need an integrated application accelerator?
- What processing can I offload to ZXTM?
How does ZXTM accelerate my applications?
Through its unique software architecture and high-performance process model, Zeus Extensible Traffic Manager (ZXTM) accelerates the performance of your existing application infrastructure by:
- Acting as a data buffer between the application server and slow, unreliable Internet connections, ensuring that the application only sees quick requests over a reliable LAN connection, and so keeps system resource allocated for the shortest duration possible;
- Preventing excessive load on any one application server through effective cluster management and server selection;
- Offloading CPU-intensive tasks such as SSL and XSLT processing from the application server onto ZXTM itself, which has been optimized for those tasks.
In each case, the application goes faster because it has less work to do. It uses the processing power freed up to handle more transactions and is therefore more productive.
Why do I need integrated application acceleration?
Both hardware appliances and software solutions, through performance tuning and / or additional processing power, can act as application accelerators. However, the significant additional cost of having a number of dedicated accelerator units often outweighs the benefits they yield. The trend is now for multi-capability units which, along with advanced load balancing and traffic management capabilities, provide application acceleration to the cluster of servers they manage. ZXTM saves you the additional cost of buying and racking separate application acceleration appliances by combining both application-aware traffic management and acceleration into a single unit.
What processing can I offload to ZXTM?
ZXTM can be used to perform SSL decryption on behalf of your network services. Because ZXTM uses Zeus Technology's own SSL implementation in combination with US Government-approved RSA cryptographic libraries, the price / performance ratio offered is unequalled by any other SSL solution, as testified by Zeus' dominance of the industry-standard SPECweb99_SSL benchmarks. More information on SSL offload is available.
A new area in which ZXTM can accelerate your applications is when one application needs to share data with another, requiring the translation of one dialect of XML into another via the open standard mechanism called Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT). ZXTM can perform the XSLT translation of data from one dialect of XML to another on behalf of applications communicating with each other either over a corporate Local Area Network, or between separate companies over the wider Internet. More information on XSLT offload is available.
As with other products in Zeus Technology's product portfolio, the unique and highly-efficient process architecture of ZXTM allows it to buffer data between the application server and slow, unreliable Internet connections. This ensures that the application only sees quick requests over a reliable LAN connection, and so the application keeps system resource allocated for the shortest duration possible. This acceleration effect is most noticable in process- or thread-based application servers, for instance Apache web server.
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