The Requirement for Application Redirection

To cope with the ever-increasing spread of information, we have begun to build faster, bigger, better, and more intelligent networks to allow the world to communicate. These forms of communication are already evolving, and voice data and video have converged onto our PC. With televisions , mobile phones, and PDAs becoming extremely popular methods to provide constant access to this media, the amount of data in any form that we send and receive will undoubtedly increase. Network manufacturers and providers will continually push the boundaries in order to provide more than is required by the ravenous consumer. Being able to intelligently manage the network is a fundamental requirement that is already being addressed. Content switching, while seen as a new technology, will become as widespread as hubs and switches are today. Application redirection is one of the mechanisms available that gives us the ability to offload tasks to devices without impacting performance. These devices, or appliances, are typically designed to cater for that particular application. They are configured and tuned purely to provide a specific function.

However, as application access and popularity increases , so does the load on the server or devices running it. Load balancing is the answer, but in many cases, as we will see in the next section, server load balancing and application redirection, while both having their roots in content switching, are two different animals indeed.

Application redirection requires that the device receiving the data is transparent. In other words, it is a proxy type of application and knows what to do with the request. Typical devices that can benefit from application redirection functionality in a load-balancing environment are:

• Caches

• Firewalls

• SSL offload appliances

• Content routing

• Proxies

• Bandwidth managers

As can be seen, application redirection gives us the ability to control certain types of traffic and send it to specifically suited devices. This allows us to implement devices within the infrastructure to improve performance by handing the load to multiple devices, and to do this transparently . This means that there is no configuration or intervention required at the user desktop. This can save an organization vast sums of money, as deployment can be carried out relatively quickly. Visits to each and every user are not required in order for them to make use of the service. When you have thousands of remote users, coordination of a network upgrade or application enhancement is extremely difficult and time consuming.