Why ZXTM? #1: Scalability and Managability

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. In this article, I’ll describe one capability of ZXTM – its unique scalability and manageability.

Zeus has been building highly scalable internet software since before the dot com boom (and that’s a long time in Internet time!). The Zeus Web Server was years ahead of its time, and is still one of the few web servers available with a rich and complete GUI that can manage enormous web clusters as easily as it can manage a single server.

The same design philosophy – unlimited scalability and simple management - drove the design of ZXTM from the very beginning.

What is ZXTM?

What is ZXTM?
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ZXTM is an Application Delivery Controller (ADC). It runs on general-purpose hardware – Intel, AMD or SPARC servers, blades, even virtualized server hardware, and squeezes a huge amount of performance from these low-cost compute platforms. If you need more performance (Gbits of traffic), or you want to add levels of redundancy, it’s trivial to build a larger ZXTM cluster. Bring up another ZXTM instance on the network, let it detect and join the existing cluster, and that is all there is to it.

Administration

The Zeus Web Server had a single administration interface that pushed configuration out to all its clustered web servers. ZXTM introduced a new innovation, eliminating the single point of failure of a central administration interface. ZXTM systems run in a peer-to-peer manner – you can use the administration interface on any of the ZXTM systems, and you’re managing the cluster as a whole:

1. Each ZXTM system has a user interface
2. The Administrator can use any UI
3. Configuration changes are replicated across the cluster, and status, logs and performance information is automatically collected and merged

It is as easy to manage a fault tolerant cluster of 6 or 10 ZXTM systems as it is to manage one, and the carefully designed UI makes it easy to use the product.

Take the word of some of our customers:

Management

When you have a cluster of systems, management isn’t just about great interfaces, coordinated reporting and configuration. Administration tasks can become difficult too, unless the system is designed to cope with that as well:

ZXTM is software...

And finally, don’t forget: ZXTM is just software. What does that mean when you’re managing your application delivery network?

Imagine an application delivery controller that doesn’t need proprietary hardware. Imagine that your cold spare was a software image, not an unused appliance. Imagine if you could grow your application delivery cluster without having to wait for the UPS delivery van first!

Imagine if you could double your performance by dropping in a new processor – and you weren’t locked in to proprietary hardware at proprietary prices. Imagine if you wanted to cache more data, and all it took was another stick of RAM. Imagine if every time Moore’s Law delivered faster servers, you could ride it and keep step as your own traffic grew.

Only, you don’t need to imagine it! Try ZXTM out – it’s just a download away. The quickest way to start is our "Desktop Edition". You can run it directly on a Windows or Linux system and get going within a couple of minutes.

Coming up...

That's "Scalability and Manageability". Coming up - "What's so special about TrafficScript™", "Application Acceleration" and "Why ZXTM's flexible deployment options make a difference".

Owen Garrett [Zeus Dev Team] 17 January 2008