Nortel gear to direct heavy Web traffic

By ROBIN SCHREIER HOHMAN
Network World, 03/01/99

SANTA CLARA, CALIF. - Two of the big four internetwork equipment makers already have some kind of load-balancing strategy. Nortel Networks will make it three when the firm announces plans to resell load balancers from IPivot under a relationship that could eventually result in a blade, or specialized software, for Nortel division Bay Networks' Accelar switches.

Nortel's aim is to give the Accelar line the ability to efficiently direct Web traffic. At first, Nortel will sell IPivot appliances alongside the Accelar line, sources confirm. The next step will be to transform core IPivot hardware into a blade that plugs into the Accelar switches.

Eventually, Nortel may take the software code from the IPivot Intelligent Broker device and plug it right into the Accelar switches, the sources say. That way, every switch will have the ability to balance Web traffic.

Nortel and IPivot refuse to comment on the deal, which is expected to be revealed at the CeBit trade show in Hannover, Germany later this month. Nortel is expected to ship the devices by the end of March.

Nortel is not far behind the other three top hardware players. 3Com has yet to flesh out its load-balancing strategy, which largely consists of recommending that customers tap the load-balancing features built into Windows NT. Cisco has long sold its Local Director, but as is the case with some other Cisco products, customers have complained about high prices. Cabletron, meanwhile, last month struck a deal to sell load-balancing products from F5 Labs along with its SmartSwitch Router line. Like the Accelar, the SmartSwitch is a high-end Layer 3/Layer 4 chassis-based switch that supports Gigabit Ethernet.

Much like Nortel's reported strategy, Cabletron's plan is to take code from F5 and put it into the SmartSwitch, company officials say.

Load-balancing devices distribute incoming Web traffic among servers. Companies can perform load balancing through a black box, such as IPivot's Intelligent Broker, or through a Layer 4 switch, such as Alteon's Acedirector or Foundry Networks' ServerIron. Intelligent Broker only parses incoming traffic; it doesn't forward it. The IPivot products must be attached to a forwarding device, such as a switch or a router.

IPivot boxes will connect to the Accelar switch via a 100Base-T link. User requests - in the form of TCP/IP packets - will enter the Accelar switch, which will pass them off to the IPivot box. The box will decide which server to send the requests to based on a number of parameters, including traffic and/or application type. Intelligent Broker will then pass the requests back to the Accelar along with the appropriate server IP address in the packet headers.

By year-end, the IPivot boxes should be able to support Gigabit Ethernet connections.

Bay is expected to use the latest IPivot devices, which will be announced in a couple of weeks. The new appliances from IPivot have a completely revamped hardware architecture. IPivot's upcoming Intelligent Broker 7000 uses Layer 7 information to perform content-aware load balancing. That ability means it can peer further into a packet to distribute traffic by URL or transaction type. Layer 4 load balancers can only see deep enough to identify the type of traffic, such as whether it's File Transfer Protocol or HTTP.

Nortel plans to resell Intelligent Broker 4000, 7000 and 7000m. The 7000 series uses Layer 7 information to load balance by URLs among geographically distributed servers.

The use of Layer 7 for load balancing is somewhat controversial. While there's no question that Layer 7 support gives a device more information than is garnered at Layer 4, there's some debate as to whether that information is worth the performance hit.

The real value in load balancing at Layer 7 is the ability to prioritize user requests by application. For example, you could route revenue-producing requests from e-commerce sites to faster servers and send people who are just browsing to a slower server. But looking deeper into the packet also means slightly slower performance and higher cost. "At the moment, there aren't a large number of really compelling applications," says Peter Christy, principal analyst at Collaborative Research.

Up and coming

IPivot is a promising start-up based in San Diego. Brett Helm, IPivot's president and CEO, was vice president and general manager for @Work, a division of the @Home cable service company.

So far, IPivot has secured nearly $15 million in two rounds of financing. Backers include Doll Capital Management and Crosspoint Venture Partners.

Traffic management, which includes load balancing, is a hot market that could grow from $132 million in 1998 to $1 billion by 2002, according to Collaborative Research. Analysts say they wouldn't be surprised to see load-balancing companies get snapped up by more established network equipment players this year. o