'Cookie Cutter' Solution Aids Load Balancing

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November 08, 1999 (10:42 AM EST)

'Cookie Cutter' Solution Aids Load Balancing

By Christine Zimmerman,

ExciteAtHome was having a chronic problem: The broadband Internet access provider's load-balancing products were not adequately managing large numbers of users connecting over IP via proxy servers. The result was inadequate scalability.

"Current solutions provide rudimentary load balancing, but we needed something that can actually understand our applications and how to cache them," said Joe Minarik, senior manager of portal/regional network engineering at ExciteAtHome.

The company's infrastructure, based on Gigabit and Fast Ethernet, is configured in a mesh topology made up of Cisco routers and switches to provide full redundancy. ExciteAtHome's Web servers are a mix of Sun and NT workstations, running various servers and applications to support tens of millions of users each day.

To address problems of the nature that ExciteAtHome has experienced, Alteon WebSystems on Monday is announcing Web-switching capabilities, called "cookie cutting," that give IT managers the ability to manage Web traffic on a granular, user-by-user basis.

Cookie cutting technology lets IT managers redirect and bind traffic from individual users to specific servers using cookies. Cookies are the small electronic identifiers dynamically generated by a Web server to store on a user's computer so it can later be read back from that computer when a user revisits the website that initially generated the cookie.

The ability to parse cookies guarantees that each user will be sent to the same Web server that already has this information cached, ensuring optimal performance.

Minarik said conventional load-balancing products make it difficult or impossible to ensure a user is directed to the same server because there has not been a way to tie user information to an IP address.

The cookie-cutting feature is available as part of Alteon's Web OS 6.0, free with the company's Web switches. It is currently supported on Alteon's 180e and ACEdirector 3 platforms.