Application Scenarios

Maximum Redundancy in an ISP
Organizations in the business of providing customers with Internet services require a highly redundant network that also delivers flexible high performance. In this application, an ISP has deployed a redundant mesh of Layer 2, Layer 3 and Layer 4 technology to provide its customers with reliable, consistent service.

Primary and secondary ServerIron switches provide highly resilient Layer 4 services, including load balancing to the server farms. For additional redundancy, the ServerIron switches are connected via a redundant Fast Ethernet trunk group. For optimum performance, the ServerIron switches are connected to Foundry TurboIron Layer 2 switches via Gigabit Ethernet links. Redundancy is further ensured by the use of Gigabit Ethernet trunk groups between the TurboIron switches. Layer 3 resiliency is provided by the use of Foundry's Standby Router Protocol between the NetIron switching routers. [See Figure 1]

Transparent Cache Switching
In this application, redundant ServerIron switches are used to improve Internet response time, decrease WAN access costs and increase resiliency. When transparent cache switching is enabled on the ServerIron switches, all web queries from end-users are transparently forwarded directly to an available cache server for processing. The cache servers process local inquiries and make update requests to remote web servers via the ServerIron. ServerIron continuously monitors the availability of the cache servers. If a web cache server fails, the ServerIron automatically directs subsequent requests to the next available cache server or to the WAN link. [See Figure 2]

Increasing Performance in Enterprise Intranets
ServerIron significantly increases server performance and eases network administration in companies that support video, web and news servers. With ServerIron's load balancing, logical communities of servers can be created. The single IP address simplifies management, and services can be directed by type to multiple load balanced server farms. Using ServerIron's weighted percentage option, the network manager can ensure that the fastest server receives a larger percentage of traffic. [See Figure 3]