Why ZXTM? #2: Deeper intelligence with TrafficScriptJuniper 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. What is ZXTM?ZXTM is a Layer-7 load balancer with a large number of additional traffic management capabilities – including security policies, rate shaping, bandwidth control, content caching and compression. What is TrafficScript™?ZXTM includes a scripting language called ‘TrafficScript™’. Without TrafficScript, you would have to configure an ADC with a single, common policy that described how to handle all your network traffic. However, imagine the problems you could solve if you didn’t have to use the same ‘lowest-common-denominator’ policy for all your traffic. Imagine if instead there were a simple way to tell your ADC how to handle each type of request, in as much detail as you need. Imagine if your ADC could rewrite requests if your back-end infrastructure had changed, or if changing security policies required it. Imagine if your ADC could inspect every response to make sure it was sound, rewriting it or even retrying the request against a different server if an error is detected. That’s where TrafficScript comes in. It’s a simple scripting language, built right into the core of ZXTM. With TrafficScript, you can specify exactly how you want your traffic to be handled, inspecting and modifying each request and response as you wish, and pulling in each of ZXTM’s features as you require. TrafficScript in practiceTrafficScript can be used in a tactical way, to work around application bugs, security problems and client inconsistencies. It can be used in a deeply strategic manner to pull together disparate applications with different interfaces, future-proofing your services against changes in any of the back-end components. The KnowledgeHub website is full of examples of how TrafficScript is used to address real-world problems – managing and securing HTTP traffic, Web Services, SMTP, POP3, etc.
Take the word of some of our customers: "We have been able to seamlessly migrate over 24,000 documents to our new content management system. Three lines of TrafficScript code were used to dynamically rewrite requests that map seamlessly into the new path name in a matter of hours as opposed to months of manual effort." Mark Neilson, Infrastructure Manager, Newport City Council (read more...) "Our decision to go with ZXTM was an easy one because it can be customized to suit Bango’s needs and the needs of our customers." Tim Moss, CTO, Bango (read more...) "The only restriction with ZXTM would appear to be the imagination of the user." Steve Broadhead, BroadBand Testing (read more...) TrafficScript is easy to useDespite its power, TrafficScript does not compromise on ease of use. The programming model is simple. There are just two types of TrafficScript rules – rules that are run on a request, and rules that run on a response. If they have to pause (for example, to read more data off the network), they are suspended and reawaken transparently (read more...). TrafficScript carries very little performance impact. TrafficScript isn’t implemented using an external third-party language like TCL, with all of the baggage that entails. Instead, the TrafficScript engine runs within the high-performance ZXTM core and TrafficScript rules can be run with very little overhead. Benchmarks show ZXTM inspecting and rewriting HTML and XML data at over 1Gbit/second. TrafficScript fully understands the data and protocols it is managing. For example, if you wish to inspect an HTTP response, it’s not necessary to downgrade the connection to HTTP/1.0 first, disabling keepalive, chunking and content encoding. TrafficScript is fully conversant in HTTP, and the ‘http.getResponseBody()’ function will automatically de-chunk and decompress an HTTP response, preserving keepalive connections and correctly handling the vagaries of the HTTP protocol. TrafficScript is a straightforward, imperative-style programming language, in the same vein as PHP, Java, Basic or JavaScript. However, to make things even simpler, ZXTM and ZXTM LB include a visual "RuleBuilder" that lets you build simple traffic management rules using a graphical interface, with no programming required. Try it outTry ZXTM – 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.
Owen Garrett
[Zeus Dev Team] 30 January 2008
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