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By Kelly Jackson Higgins
What if your Web servers couldn't handle electronic-commerce traffic? That's a discovery Rogers Communications doesn't ever want to face. So the Canadian media company built load-balancing technology into its corporate data center's server farms to prevent server overload when its e-commerce business goes live this year.
"This was to prepare us to do e-commerce," says John Howell, senior architect for Rogers Communications, Toronto, which plans to sell everything from cellular phones to pay-per-view movies on its Web site. "We wanted an infrastructure that prepared us for the throughput and performance we would need for the future." It's all about making sure Rogers' customers and business partners don't get stuck in any traffic jams while trying to access its site.
"We anticipated that the Web servers would get clogged," Howell says. "So we wanted to make sure they were redundant and the traffic was balanced among them."
Ten Alteon Networks ACEswitch 180 server switches balance the traffic flows among Rogers' five Web and cache servers, as well as its VPN and firewall servers. The Gigabit Ethernet server switches redirect traffic when one server goes down or gets jammed with HTTP traffic. The switches also route and handle the packet filtering for Rogers' firewalls, and all of Rogers' servers are connected via Gigabit Ethernet.
This architecture let Rogers point to different zones within an intranet connection, such as to development or production Web areas. That way, production Web traffic can be redirected to a specific server. To the user, 20 servers appear as one virtual server. When a user at his or her workstation makes an HTTP request to a Rogers'-hosted Web site, the switch determines the most available of the series of Web servers. When a user requests Internet access, the switch directs that request to a proxy server. "It's load-sharing among cache proxies, and if they all aren't available, it then redirects the traffic to the Internet," rather than to the proxy server, Howell says.
The trade-off of running multifunction server switches, however, is that they execute so many different functions. "You've got regular routing, switching, redirecting and load-balancing all in one box," Howell says. "Setting up groups and filters can get hairy when a couple of boxes are load-sharing and one goes down and another picks up immediately at gigabit speed. You just need to remember what you configured them to do."
Now that network traffic is being spread more equitably among the Web, cache, VPN and firewall servers, Rogers is looking at redirecting and balancing traffic across its entire WAN. Among other things, the company may deploy some bandwidth management tools or emerging Quality of Service technologies, such as Diff-Serv.
"We are looking at how we can make our whole WAN run better," Howell says.
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