Zeus Traffic Manager: Deploying BlackBoard Academic Suite

Blackboard’s Academic Suite™ facilitates learning and knowledge transfer within an educational environment. The different products are provided to the user with a unified look and feel for easy end-user use. The applications themselves run on BEA’s Weblogic servers, presenting the user with a fast and robust experience.

Why manage your network traffic using Zeus Traffic Manager?

• Improved Availability: Zeus Traffic Manager is able to make your BlackBoard 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 BlackBoard, and increase its capacity, giving you a much better return on your software and infrastructure investment.
• More secure: Acting as a ‘gatekeeper’, Zeus Traffic Manager delivers improved security as a line of defence for BlackBoard , 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

Zeus Traffic Manager provides a single point-of-entry to a cluster of BlackBoard servers. With a combination of passive and active health monitoring and performance measurements, Zeus software can route incoming requests to the fastest-responding servers and avoid servers that are failed or underperforming.

Request rate shaping ensures that your BlackBoard servers can never be overloaded with requests, and advanced Session Persistence reliably pins users' sessions to individual servers for maximum reliability.

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Acceleration

Zeus Traffic Manager's Application Acceleration capabilities improve the end-user experience and increase the capacity of your BlackBoard 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.

BlackBoard Academic Suite builds on the strong foundation of BEA WebLogic. Zeus Traffic Manager has been proven to:

• As much as double the transaction rate that can be achieved from WebLogic, with no additional software or server tuning.
• Double the response speed, under sustained load from multiple clients.
• Provide over 15-times the SSL performance.
• Eliminate all errors for all but the most demanding tests.

Read the Broadband Testing report.

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Security

Total server isolation, request and response scrubbing, request validation and request rate shaping help to place your BlackBoard 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.

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Management

Zeus Traffic Manager'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 BlackBoard server out of service without interrupting any ongoing transactions or sessions for routine maintenance or redeployment.

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Technical Notes

• Deploying BlackBoard Academic Suite with Zeus Traffic Manager
• Improving the Performance of BEA WebLogic with Zeus Traffic Manager