Zeus Traffic Manager is a powerful application traffic manager. The base version includes full load balancing capabilities, plus TrafficScript and Java Extensions (for traffic inspection, rewriting and control) and Rate Shaping. Deployment Options Standalone, or in clusters of 2 or more units for scalability and fault tolerance.
The powerful TrafficScript™ engine lets you implement whatever traffic management policies are most appropriate for your enterprise, drawing on the whole range of capabilities of Zeus Traffic Manager.
Where necessary, JavaT Extensions can be used to implement additional, complex traffic transformations and other policies.
Zeus Traffic Manager is available as software and as a Virtual Appliance.
What is a Application Delivery Controller?
Application Delivery Controllers came about from a need to improve the performance and reliability of traditional web applications, but they have moved on significantly from simple hardware devices that load-balance TCP connections.
Zeus’ Traffic Manager product is a good example of the new breed of Application Delivery Controllers (ADCs). As the only software ADC available, it’s flexible and can be deployed in a wide manner of ways. The TrafficScript programming language allows the application developer to take advantage of all of the features of the product, from rate shaping and service level monitoring to full request and response rewriting, and rapidly build innovative solutions to application problems. The Zeus KnowledgeHub at http://knowledgehub.zeus.com/ contains lots of sample code, hints and tips, and a free download for test and development purposes.
Capabilities and Benefits
Application Acceleration
By placing Zeus Traffic Manager in front of your networked and web-enabled applications, you can boost the number of transactions your infrastructure can handle, and dramatically increase the speed and responsiveness that your users experience.
Service Reliability
Detect and work around application and hardware failures, ensuring your services have the best possible availability, whatever the circumstances.
Application Security
Mitigate flash floods, filter invalid or malicious requests, apply access controls - all to be confident that your applications are hardened and your user data is safe.
Manage your traffic and infrastructure with Zeus Traffic Manager
Zeus Traffic Manager keeps you informed with detailed logs and status reports. Manage, transform and route traffic across multiple applications, and manage clusters of application servers to reduce your operational costs.
Protocol and Application Support
- Application servers: a, IBM WebSphere, Oracle, JBoss, SAP, PeopleSoft, Siebel, Apache TomCat, Caucho Resin, Sun Java System Application Server, GlassFish, etc.
- Web Servers: Apache, Zeus Web Server, IIS, SunONE, iPlanet, etc.
- Web Applications: Exchange, Sharepoint, Outlook Web Access, etc.
- Media Delivery: full RTSP (TCP and UDP) support for Windows Media Services, Darwin Streaming Server, Helix Server, QuickTime Streaming Server
- VoIP Applications: support for SIP (Session Initiation Protocol)
- Next-generation protocols, including on-the-fly acceleration, inspection and modification of SOA/XML and Web2.0/AJAX traffic
- Detailed inspection and modification of long-lived protocols such as SMTP, POP3, IMAP and database sessions
- FTP, DNS, almost any TCP or UDP-based protocol
- Fully supports both IPv4 and IPv6 traffic, in mixed deployments where necessary
Zeus Traffic Manager's TrafficScript™ Rules Language and JavaT Extensions can inspect, modify and route any TCP or UDP protocol.
Feature Comparison
The Feature Comparison matrix describes the differences between Zeus Traffic Manager and Zeus Load Balancer.
Also available for Virtual Environments such as VMWare and Windows Virtual Server.
Resources
Zeus Traffic Manager VA manages your application traffic, inspecting, transforming and routing requests as it load-balances them across the application infrastructure.
Zeus Traffic Manager VA has passed VMware's stringent Virtual Appliance Certification program and can also be deployed on Windows Server systems equipped with Virtual Server 2005 R2. It contains the award-winning ZXTM or ZXTM LB software, a proven operating system foundation and additional management tools to make installation and configuration quick and easy.
Traffic Management for Virtualized Environments
Available for VMware Virtual Infrastructure 3 and Windows Virtual Server 2005 R2.
Benefits of Zeus Traffic Manager VA
- Fast and easy deployment
- VMware Certified, Supported on Win2K.
- Lower consumption of datacenter resources.
- Scalability with growing business needs.
- Award-winning functionality of ZXTM or ZXTM LB.
VMware VI & Dynamic Provisioning with Zeus Traffic Manager
How can you respond immediately to sudden increases in load, even at night, and still sleep soundly in your bed? Automated Dynamic Provisioning of course!
The popularity of Virtual Infrastructures seems to be increasing on a daily basis, and besides the obvious savings in power, cooling, and hardware, a major benefit of the Virtual data center is increased manageability, and dynamic provisioning. Regardless of whether you think of Zeus Traffic Manager as an Application Delivery Controller, or an Application Traffic Manager, its position in the network means that it is perfectly placed to help you take control of your virtual environment.
Zeus Traffic Manager has always had the ability to accelerate web applications, and optimize throughput and resource utilization. Sophisticated monitoring, rate shaping, content caching, and the various process and network offloading features of Zeus Traffic Manager have all helped manage, and better utilize the available resources. Now with Zeus Traffic Manager 5.0 and Java Extensions, we can go a step further and actually provision new resources on the fly, directly from ZXTM.
A Detailed Example of Dynamic Provisioning
The ability to control VMware Virtual Infrastructures can be used in combination with a ZXTM Service Level Monitoring class (SLM). This gives us the ability to dynamically deploy a new node, when the SLM class detects that the service is under load. A simple TrafficScript™ rule can check the conformance of a service, and in the event that the percentage of conforming requests drops below a predetermined thresh hold, it can initiate provisioning. The TrafficScript rule will call a Java Extension and direct it to power on a new node, once the power change has completed, the extension could then connect back to Zeus Traffic Manager and add that new node into the service pool.
Zeus Traffic Manager VA is the only traffic management solution available as a virtual appliance. Zeus Traffic Manager VA is available with either Zeus Traffic Manager traffic management software, or ZXTM LB load balancing software.
Alternative Platforms
| VMware Virtual Infrastructure 3 |
 |
ESX 3.0 (3.0.0+) |
| Microsoft Virtual Server |
|
Windows Server 2003R2, Virtual Server 2005R2 |
Zeus Traffic Manager Software can be installed on any supported Linux, Solaris or FreeBSD server. Contact Us for more information.