Zeus Traffic Manager: Deploying Microsoft SharePoint Services
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Microsoft SharePoint Services provide an integrated suite of server capabilities for central storage and collaboration, space for documents, information and ideas.
By using Zeus Traffic Manager to load-balance and manage traffic across two or more clustered SharePoint servers, you can achieve dramatic improvements in capacity and reliability. Adding more SharePoint servers to your cluster will scale capacity linearly, and Zeus Traffic Manager's application acceleration technology - offloading, caching, HTTP optimization - increases the capacity improvements further. When you load-balance traffic across two or more SharePoint servers, you make the entire service resilient to routine downtime (upgrades and reboots) and unexpected errors (such as hardware failures).
Why manage your network traffic using Zeus Traffic Manager?
- Improved Availability: Zeus Traffic Manager is able to make your SharePoint 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 SharePoint, 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 SharePoint, 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 SharePoint 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 SharePoint servers can never be overloaded with requests, and advanced Session Persistence reliably pins users' sessions to individual servers for maximum reliability.
Acceleration
Zeus Traffic Manager's Application Acceleration capabilities improve the end-user experience and increase the capacity of your SharePoint 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.
Zeus Traffic Manager improves application performance by:
- Reducing the number of concurrent connections and transactions the SharePoint server must handle, using a combination of network optimizations: low-level TCP offload, TCP acceleration, HTTP connection multiplexing and HTTP connection reuse. Zeus Traffic Manager changes the environment that the SharePoint 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 SharePoint server processes by sophisticated context-sensitive content caching.
- Offloading compute-intensive tasks such as SSL decryption, content compression and XML processing onto Zeus software’s high performance software engines.
- Utilizing performance-sensitive load balancing, routing each transaction to the SharePoint 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 SharePoint 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
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 SharePoint server out of service without interrupting any ongoing transactions or sessions for routine maintenance or redeployment.
Technical Notes
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