Zeus Traffic Manager: Deploying Siebel web-based applications

Technical Notes
OAS Deployment

Oracle's Siebel Customer Relationship Management (CRM) enables organizations to transform the customer experience.

With Zeus Traffic Manager, you can improve the performance of your Siebel deployment, making it more reliable and more secure, and easier to manage.

Why manage your network traffic using Zeus Traffic Manager?

Improved Availability: Zeus Traffic Manager is able to make your Siebel 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 Siebel, 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 Siebel, 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 Siebel 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 Siebel 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 Siebel 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 Siebel application performance by:

Reducing the number of concurrent connections and transactions the Siebel servers 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 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 Siebel servers process 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 Siebel 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 Siebel 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 Siebel server out of service without interrupting any ongoing transactions or sessions for routine maintenance or redeployment.