VMware ESX and ZXTM VA (ZXTM Virtual Appliance) are a great combination and to ensure that you get the best out of the product a few tweaks need to be made once ZXTM has been imported into ESX. Read more...

Crispin Flowerday [Zeus Dev Team] 02 April 2008   2 comments  

Everyone knows that web surfers want snappy web sites, with fast loading times and quick responses. ZXTM™ has all kinds of whizzy features to accelerate your web site. But even then, sometimes you will have to cope with the odd slow and complicated request. How do you keep your web pages feeling snappy, and more importantly, keep that potential customer glued to your site? Read more...

Ben [Zeus Dev Team] 01 April 2008   1 comment  

"700% improvement in application response times... we can measure a 400% improvement in performance... we’ve measured nearly a 600% increase in transactions serviced on the same hardware!"

How does adding ZXTM to your application delivery infrastructure produce these performance gains? In this article, we’ll describe some of the technologies in ZXTM that extract more performance, responsiveness and capacity from your networked applications. Read more...

Owen Garrett [Zeus Dev Team] 20 March 2008   1 comment  

Deployments using Citrix Web Interface and Presentation Server often have a Citrix Secure Gateway (CSG) as their single point of contact for connections. Whilst this gives a convenient entry point, no scaling technology is built in, meaning that any such system is bound by the SSL performance of a single CSG. This article shows how to scale a CSG deployment, achieve high availability and better performance. Read more...

Brian Cowe [Zeus Systems Engineering] 18 March 2008    

Juniper recently pulled out of the Application Delivery Controller (ADC) market because they found it increasingly difficult to differentiate their DX product from competitors’ devices.

TrafficScript™ is one of the key features that differentiate ZXTM from almost all other ADC devices available today. It gives you the power to make your traffic management device handle traffic in precisely the way that you want. Read more...

Owen Garrett [Zeus Dev Team] 30 January 2008    

Why do customers use ZXTM to manage application traffic? There’s a number of reasons – its deep, programmable inspection and intelligence, its ability to make applications run faster and give them more capacity, and the unique range of deployment options. Read more...

Owen Garrett [Zeus Dev Team] 17 January 2008    

As websites grow, the structure of their URLs can change dramatically. This makes things much more manageable from an operational point of view, but what can be done about all of those links people have to that website? Ideally, we would like to ensure that people with the old link are presented the most relevant content on the new website. When the web-application is large or under the control of a different department, it may be difficult to change things. Well TrafficScript™ comes to the rescue once again. Read more...

Dec [Zeus Dev Team] 07 January 2008    

Snort is a popular open source intrusion detection system that analyzes network traffic in order to detect patterns (stored as a set of rules) that could possibly be malicious. ZXTM's TrafficScript™ has the ability to read and manipulate HTTP traffic, so we can use the Snort's well tested rules library and TrafficScript to turn ZXTM into a lightweight intrusion detection system for the HTTP servers behind it. Read more...

Matt H [Zeus Dev Team] 20 December 2007   2 comments  

There's a great article by Lori MacVittie over at F5's DevCentral describing the case for load-balancing your Enterprise Service Bus: Load Balancing as an ESB Service. As load balancers get more sophisticated and SOA is more widely deployed, architects are beginning to realize how the great things a traffic manager can do for a website can be used deep within an SOA application as well. Read more...

Owen Garrett [Zeus Dev Team] 15 November 2007    

ZXTM 4.2 contains a new feature, called 'Forward Proxy Mode'. But what is a Proxy? A reverse proxy? A forward proxy? And what can you do with such a feature? Read more...

Ben [Zeus Dev Team] 17 October 2007   1 comment  

Sometimes you may want to determine the country of origin of each remote client so that you can act on this information using TrafficScript™. This article describes how to use Maxmind's free GeoLite Country database within ZXTM to determine a client's geographic location from their source IP address. Read more...

Owen Garrett [Zeus Dev Team] 18 September 2007   6 comments  

SOA applications need just as much help as traditional web applications when it comes to reliability, performance and traffic management. Zeus' SDC and SON white papers cover this in detail, but this article jumps straight in with four down-to-earth TrafficScript™ examples to show you how you can inspect the XML messages and manage SOA transactions. Read more...

Owen Garrett [Zeus Dev Team] 29 August 2007    

If you wish to use ZXTM to inspect or modify the headers or body of SMTP messages, you need to write some TrafficScript™ to synchronize the two halves of the conversation, to ensure that the connection doesn't stall. This article explains how to do this, and presents an example TrafficScript rule that can be used as the basis of more advanced SMTP rules. Read more...

Julian [Zeus Dev Team] 09 August 2007    

This article examines how legitimate URLs are built, how malicious URLs can be made harder to detect by hexadecimal encoding, and, of course, how ZXTM and TrafficScript can be used to reject them anyway. Read more...

michael [Zeus Dev Team] 18 July 2007    

Popular news and blogging sites such as Slashdot and Digg have huge readerships. They are community driven and allow their members to post articles on various topics ranging from hazelnut chocolate bars to global warming. These sites, due to their massive readership, have the power to generate huge spikes in the web traffic to those (un)fortunate enough to get mentioned in their articles. Fortunately ZXTM and TrafficScript™ can help. Read more...

Mark Boddington [Zeus Systems Engineering] 12 July 2007    

Bandwidth can be expensive. So it can be annoying if other websites steal your bandwidth from you. A common problem is when people use 'hot-linking' or 'deep-linking' to place images from your site on to their own pages. Every time someone views their website, you will pick up the bandwidth tab.

So how can this be stopped? Read more...

Ben [Zeus Dev Team] 09 July 2007    

We love Techworld's take on ZXTM GLB:

"Zeus is offering network administrators the chance to play Dr Evil, thanks to the map-based user interface for its new global load balancers". Read more...

Owen Garrett [Zeus Dev Team] 27 June 2007   2 comments  

ZXTM GLB (ZXTM Global Load Balancer) is Zeus' new Global Server Load Balancing product. Whereas products like ZXTM load-balance your traffic across servers within a single datacenter, ZXTM GLB manages the DNS resolution process to load-balance users across multiple different datacenters. Read more...

Owen Garrett [Zeus Dev Team] 26 June 2007   4 comments  

What can you do if an isolated problem causes one or more of your application servers to fail? How can you prevent vistors to your website seeing the error, and instead send them a valid response?

This article shows how to use TrafficScript™ to inspect responses from your application servers and retry the requests against several different machines if a failure is detected. Read more...

Owen Garrett [Zeus Dev Team] 24 May 2007    

Lots of websites provide a protected area for authorized users to log in to. However, what happens if a paid user's account details are leaked? This article describes how to detect when one person's account is being accessed by multiple people. Read more...

Ben [Zeus Dev Team] 26 March 2007    

When you move content around a web site, links break. Even if you've patched up all your internal links, site visitors from external links, outdated search results and people's bookmarks will be broken and return a '404 Not Found' error. Read more...

Owen Garrett [Zeus Dev Team] 08 February 2007    

"The 'contact us' feature on many websites is often insecure, and makes it easy to launch denial of service (DoS) attacks on corporate mail servers."

What is this attack, and how can you use ZXTM to defend against it? Read more...

Owen Garrett [Zeus Dev Team] 06 February 2007    

It's that time of the year, when the boss reminds you that you've got to change every single 'Copyright 2006' in the footer of your web pages to 'Copyright 2007'... at midnight, New Year's Eve.

Fear not. With a little TrafficScript™, you can celebrate with everyone else, and lay the guilt on the boss when you return in the New Year. Read more...

Owen Garrett [Zeus Dev Team] 22 December 2006    

You may have noticed that we performed a major refresh on our corporate web site earlier this year. It was a lot of work for our shiny, small-but-super-effective marketing department and (as you may also have noticed) it is still somewhat of a work-in-process.

As an experiment in drinking our own cool-aid I decided to try to generate meta-tags using ZXTM’s traffic inspection and response rewriting capabilities. Read more...

Sambeau [Zeus Dev Team] 20 December 2006   1 comment  

The JBoss Application Server is a widely used and very popular J2EE certified platform for deploying enterprise Java applications. The Application server supports all J2EE 1.4 features and includes support for clustering, caching and persistence.

This article will give you an overview of how ZXTM from Zeus Technology can be used to load balance a JBoss application server cluster. Read more...

Mark Boddington [Zeus Systems Engineering] 19 December 2006    

Response time is an important metric for any service. According to recent research, users are likely to abandon a website if it takes longer than four seconds to load (BBC News article). So what do you do if you want to track down a response time problem, if you want to test the time impact of a new feature or if you just want to find out which parts of your service take the most time? Read more...

Chris Boyle [Zeus Dev Team] 19 December 2006    

If you use Microsoft Visio to draw your network diagrams, you may find this Visio stencil useful. It contains pictures of Zeus' ZXTM appliances, as well as some handy rack-mount servers and isometric arrows, in the same style as Microsoft's 3D server stencils.

To use it, download the zip file and extract the 'Zeus ZXTM shapes.vss' stencil. Copy it to your 'My Documents/My Shapes' folder. Then you'll find it in your 'My Shapes' collection under 'File > Shapes'. Read more...

Owen Garrett [Zeus Dev Team] 19 December 2006   15 comments  

Web spiders are clever critters - they are automated programs designed to crawl over web pages, retrieving information from the whole of a site. (For example, Spiders power search engines and shopping comparison sites). But what do you do if your website is being overrun by the bugs? How can you prevent your service from being slowed down by a badly written, over-eager web spider?

This article describes how to use ZXTM's Rate Shaping classes to control the impact of automated spiders on your web site. Read more...

Ben [Zeus Dev Team] 11 December 2006    

We've had a great first day at the VMworld conference in Los Angeles.

VMware is taking great steps in making virtualization more accessible and easy to migrate to. One important initiative is their Virtual Appliance Marketplace - a central depot where vendors like us can list production-quality, certified commercial appliances.

Damian Reeves, Zeus CTO was invited to participate in an intimate Virtual Appliance Panel, immediately after Diane Greene's (VMware President) keynote speech... as intimate as you can get with 7,000 VMware experts looking on! Also participating was Satish Dharmaraj (CEO, Zimbra) and Pat Kerpan (CTO, CohesiveFT). Read more...

Owen Garrett [Zeus Dev Team] 07 November 2006    

A number of organisations use java applets to do online business with customers, undertaking activities such as online chat with sales staff or real-time auctioning. Whilst this can often work well, any user who is sitting the wrong side of a restrictive outgoing firewall (perhaps only allowing HTTP connections through) will find themselves out of luck when trying to use the service.

ZXTM can extend access to this otherwise unreachable user base by allowing multiple protocols to share the same port on the same server. Read more...

Brian Cowe [Zeus Systems Engineering] 20 October 2006    

How often do you need to manage your traffic to ensure that your valuable users get adequate levels of service, and other users don't take up excessive resources?

Zeus' 'Traffic Valuation and Prioritization' white paper describes how to do exactly this, using TrafficScript to construct powerful service policies, and drawing on the capabilities of ZXTM to inspect and prioritize your traffic in a wide variety of ways. Read more...

Owen Garrett [Zeus Dev Team] 06 October 2006    

Microsoft Windows Media Services is a platform for streaming live or on-demand audio and video content over the Internet or an intranet. This article explains how to configure ZXTM to load-balance traffic to and from a cluster of Windows servers providing Media Services. Read more...

Mark Boddington [Zeus Systems Engineering] 26 September 2006