Associated Hardware

As content switching has exploded and organizations have begun to deploy applications to increase and streamline their business, the emergence of dedicated appliances to assist with some of the heavy processing has become popular. The reason why these appliances are gaining popularity is that they are designed specifically to deal with a certain application, thereby increasing the performance and manageability. This allows network administrators to deploy content switching as the central point or hub of the network, and hang these dedicated appliances off as " spokes " to increase application and network performance.

The first and probably most used appliance is the Web cache. This increases network performance by storing heavily accessed data local to the user . By using the content switch to redirect all cacheable content to the cache, the network and content can be optimized.

Offloading heavy processing tasks such as SSL from processor bound servers onto dedicated appliances such as an SSL offload appliance ensures that servers are free to perform the tasks for which they are designed.

Most manufacturers provide these appliances as part of their content switching portfolio, but in truth, any SSL offload appliance or cache will typically work with any manufacturer's content switch. There are many benefits to providing dedicated appliances for specific applications, foremost being the ability to totally dedicate all resources and processing power to increasing the speed of the associated application. Dependent on your requirements and network usage, this approach might be better for you and your organization.

Other manufacturers offer an all-in-one solution where they include all these applications within a single box. Obviously, this is easy to manage and also allows customers to turn on and off the applications they require without purchasing or installing new equipment. The downside to this is that scalability will be decreased and, if using a central CPU, performance will undoubtedly decrease as you begin to activate more applications. In addition, a failure of the SSL module, for example, could also impact the content switching and caching services as well.

Whatever your requirements, it is always important to plan and understand not only your initial network requirements, but also your expected future growth. Based on these investigations, only then can you truly make a decision on which type of content switch and associated hardware you require.