jetnexus Accelerating Load Balancer Extreme ISO Report

jetnexus Accelerating Load Balancer Extreme ISO Report A Broadband-Testing Report

First published January 2010 (V1.0) Published by Broadband-Testing A division of Connexio-Informatica 2007, Andorra La Vella Tel : +376 633010 E-mail : info@broadband-testing.co.uk Internet : HTTP://www.broadband-testing.co.uk 2010 Broadband-Testing All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, photocopied, stored on a retrieval system, or transmitted without the express written consent of the authors. Please note that access to or use of this Report is conditioned on the following: 1. The information in this Report is subject to change by Broadband-Testing without notice. 2. The information in this Report, at publication date, is believed by Broadband-Testing to be accurate and reliable, but is not guaranteed. All use of and reliance on this Report are at your sole risk. Broadband-Testing is not liable or responsible for any damages, losses or expenses arising from any error or omission in this Report. 3. NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED ARE GIVEN BY Broadband-Testing. ALL IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NON-INFRINGEMENT ARE DISCLAIMED AND EXCLUDED BY Broadband-Testing. IN NO EVENT SHALL Broadband-Testing BE LIABLE FOR ANY CONSEQUENTIAL, INCIDENTAL OR INDIRECT DAMAGES, OR FOR ANY LOSS OF PROFIT, REVENUE, DATA, COMPUTER PROGRAMS, OR OTHER ASSETS, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY THEREOF. 4. This Report does not constitute an endorsement, recommendation or guarantee of any of the products (hardware or software) tested or the hardware and software used in testing the products. The testing does not guarantee that there are no errors or defects in the products, or that the products will meet your expectations, requirements, needs or specifications, or that they will operate without interruption. 5. This Report does not imply any endorsement, sponsorship, affiliation or verification by or with any companies mentioned in this report. 6. All trademarks, service marks, and trade names used in this Report are the trademarks, service marks, and trade names of their respective owners, and no endorsement of, sponsorship of, affiliation with, or involvement in, any of the testing, this Report or Broadband-Testing is implied, nor should it be inferred. ii Broadband-Testing 1995-2010

TABLE OF CONTENTS TABLE OF CONTENTS... III BROADBAND-TESTING... IV EXECUTIVE SUMMARY... 1 INTRODUCTION: LOAD-BALANCING - A NO-BRAINER?... 2 PRODUCT OVERVIEW... 3 Technology Overview... 3 ISO INSTALL AND CONFIGURATION PUT TO THE TEST... 4 FEATURES OVERVIEW... 8 Content Caching... 8 Layer 7 Load-Balancing... 9 Connection Management... 9 Advanced Server Monitoring... 9 Web Acceleration... 9 SSL Offload... 11 Advanced Reporting/Logging... 12 SUMMARY & CONCLUSIONS... 13 TABLE OF FIGURES Figure 1 Installs On A Standard Intel Server...3 Figure 2 Install Screen...4 Figure 3 Updates During Installation...5 Figure 4 jetnexus Discovery Tool...6 Figure 5 The jetnexus ALB-X ISO Management GUI...6 Figure 6 Setting Up Server Pools...7 Figure 7 Setting Cache Performance Metrics...8 Figure 8 jetnexus ALB-X Acceleration Benefits... 10 Figure 9 Creating An SSL Certificate... 11 Figure 10 ALB-X Dashboard... 12 Broadband-Testing 1995-2010 iii

BROADBAND-TESTING Broadband-Testing is Europe s foremost independent network testing facility and consultancy organisation for broadband and network infrastructure products. Based in Andorra, Broadband-Testing provides extensive test demo facilities. From this base, Broadband-Testing provides a range of specialist IT, networking and development services to vendors and end-user organisations throughout Europe, SEAP and the United States. Broadband-Testing is an associate of the following: NSS Labs (specialising in security product testing) Limbo Creatives (bespoke software development) Broadband-Testing Laboratories are available to vendors and end-users for fully independent testing of networking, communications and security hardware and software. Broadband-Testing Laboratories operates an Approval scheme which enables products to be short-listed for purchase by end-users, based on their successful approval. Output from the labs, including detailed research reports, articles and white papers on the latest network-related technologies, are made available free of charge on our web site at HTTP://www.broadband-testing.co.uk Broadband-Testing Consultancy Services offers a range of network consultancy services including network design, strategy planning, Internet connectivity and product development assistance. iv Broadband-Testing 1995-2010

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Webserver downtime is still a major problem globally, regardless of company size and importance of the content and its availability and this is increasingly a problem for relatively small, but high-value companies, for whom the Internet is their life-blood. With the ISO version of jetnexus ALB-X load-balancer, finally we have a true mass market product and one that comes with green credentials in the way it turns redundant servers into full-on load-balancing and Application Delivery Control devices. The primary focus of vendors in this market has been high-end, meaning the vast majority of companies in the small to medium business (SMB) sector (93% of companies globally) have been unable to afford the benefits of load-balancers. The ALB-X ISO addresses this issue. The product is simplicity itself to deploy, keeping costs down in the long as well as short term. Not only is this technology applicable to the SMB market, but to any company with high value data and the need to maintain uptime, without the requirement for the more extreme features offered at great expense but some rival vendors. This argument is substantiated by jetnexus customer list, which includes many betting and gaming companies for whom access to their services is critical banks, major high street store chains, online catalogues and traders, holiday and leisure groups and global consumer product vendors. While the roadmap for jetnexus is geared around adding more functionality at Layer 7, the basic premise of avoiding complexity, maintaining affordability and feature relevance is still the primary focus. As we enter the next generation of the Internet and Web 2.0 onwards, the reliance on access to data held anywhere across the globe becomes more critical than ever, as does the need for affordable, easily managed load-balancing technology. Based on this argument, the ALB-X ISO version delivers on all counts. Broadband-Testing 1995-2010 1

INTRODUCTION: LOAD-BALANCING - A NO-BRAINER? Historically, the benefits of load-balancing and application acceleration, while clearly advantageous to any user who accesses data and applications stored in a data centre or server farm and who doesn t have been restricted to Enterprise and above. This has been due to a combination of excessive entry cost and elevated level of complexity and, often, OTT performance. In many cases, the sheer breadth and depth of features offered by load-balancing vendors has hugely exceeded the actual user requirements. This has the added issues of increasing product price and cost of deployment and management, due to that added complexity. With the ALB-X product from jetnexus we looked at last year, here we saw the first example of an affordable load-balancing solution with the kind of feature set that satisfies the 90:90 rule providing 90% of global load-balancing customer with 90% of what they need, 100% in many cases. This, in itself, really opened up load-balancing to a far greater target audience including medium-sized businesses than previous products were able to do. Making the product available as a virtual appliance (as indeed have some other vendors) extended this audience yet further. However, with the ISO version of the product we are looking at here, jetnexus has gone one stage further still, theoretically providing a self-installing load-balancer that will work on almost any server platform. A Little History Of Broadband-Testing Load-Balancer Tests For the relevance of this low-cost, low-complexity ISO release by jetnexus, let us backtrack a little. The first load-balancer product we tested at Broadband-Testing, back in 1999, was the Arrowpoint chassis-based product that cost a cool $125,000 - each. However, we should note that a decently specified server in those days from HP or similar was also a significant investment. So, load-balancer vendors could get away with charging six-figure sums for their products through the middle of the last decade and beyond. While prices have fallen, a typical load-balancer is still expensive very expensive compared to a modern server farm and it s not everyone who needs a solution that 30,000+ SSL transactions per second. The cost of server real estate has fallen so far since the heady days of the dot com boom, it is not reasonable now to demand mega-money for a load-balancer solution if it's simply cheaper to add more servers and other forms of redundancy. What jetnexus is doing, then, is taking both the excess cost and complexity out of loadbalancing. Moreover, with the ISO solution it means that, where outright performance is less important than functionality, not only can old servers be load-balanced (and performance still improved dramatically); they can become load-balancers in their own right! 2 Broadband-Testing 1995-2010

PRODUCT OVERVIEW Technology Overview The jetnexus ALB-X ISO is an installable version of the jetnexus ALB-X (Accelerating Load Balancer Extreme) we featured in our previous jetnexus product report. This is a fully integrated software product complete with operating system and installer in one, to build jetnexus ALBs on standard server hardware platforms. Key to the product is an automated install that requires no configuration or understanding of the underlying custom Linux operation system the product is based on and provided with in this incarnation. All that is required is to simply boot the jetnexus ISO on the server hardware s CD drive and let the product build itself. When completed, you have a full jetnexus ALB-X based on your chosen server platform. Figure 1 Installs On A Standard Intel Server It is important to note that this is not a cut-down version of the appliance or virtual appliance ALB-X releases; for example, it defaults to a full Active/Active configuration for a high availability system. The Green Angle The idea with the ISO version of ALB-X is that it is no longer necessary to use dedicated specialised hardware for Load Balancing. With the ever increasing performance capacities of standard server hardware, it makes a lot of sense to take advantage of this trend rather than purchasing dedicated hardware. While this is undoubtedly an efficient angle to take, it is also environmentally friendly since, in many cases, it will be possible to re-provision existing server hardware for loadbalancing purposes and focus on new server hardware acquisitions, as necessary, for specific, CPU intensive applications. Of course, the added benefit of adding load-balancing/application acceleration is that it improves the longevity of existing servers anyway, so it s a true win-win scenario. Broadband-Testing 1995-2010 3

ISO INSTALL AND CONFIGURATION PUT TO THE TEST In order to put the foolproof methodology of the ALB-X ISO product to the test, we ran a couple of installations, armed with nothing more than an ISO CD and a couple standard Intel-based, well-used servers we plucked at random from a selection of past their sellby date boxes sitting in the corner of jetnexus data centre. While jetnexus cannot guarantee that every server will make the transition to a loadbalancer, it does provides some basic requirements to help with the transformation. The absolute basics are a minimum of high-end Pentium 4, with 512MB of RAM, 80GB of hard disk space and two gigabit Ethernet ports (Intel and Broadcom have been tested). Hardly an ambitious spec then! No OS is required the ISO installer comes with Linux integrated nor is any knowledge of that OS. All post-install configuration is done via a browser. For any techies out there, it is important to note at this point that root access to the OS is not provided by default, but can be supplied upon request by the jetnexus support team in the right circumstances. So, first things first power up the server and set it to boot from the CD drive; nothing overly taxing there. Figure 2 Install Screen It s then a simple case of following onscreen instructions and there aren t many of those and the jetnexus ALB-X installs itself. During the installation, the screen updates with further information so you are not left completely in the dark literally with a blank screen and no idea how the installation is actually progressing. 4 Broadband-Testing 1995-2010

Figure 3 Updates During Installation Server Configuration Requirements Optional Extras While the basic configuration given above will provide you with compatible hardware to run the AB-X ISO version, depending on your performance requirements, there are additional requirements. For example, more memory would be required where caching is being employed. How much will of course depend on how much data you are planning for the ALB-X to cache. It is also worth noting that performance is significantly improved by running multi core CPU s. On completing the installation, the ALB-X ISO will search for a DHCP server in order to obtain an IP address. If it fails to find a DHCP server, or fails to be given an IP address, it will default to 192.168.100.100 so, either way, it s not a case of post-install panic when you have no idea how to actually access the device. Initial access to the ALB-X ISO can be made using jetnexus Discovery tool. This is a Windows application that lists all visible ALB appliances and provides direct access to them. Alternatively you can simply point a web browser at the ALB-X ISO GUI (port number is 27374), or use SSH (Secure SHell) via an Ethernet connection, or even a classic serial cable connection. Broadband-Testing 1995-2010 5

Figure 4 jetnexus Discovery Tool At this point you are up and running and ready to load-balance with a minimal amount of configuration. In line with the give you what you really need feature set, the jetnexus product has a very simple to use browser-based management GUI, as well as the aforementioned SSH or serial console alternatives. Figure 5 The jetnexus ALB-X ISO Management GUI 6 Broadband-Testing 1995-2010

The device is, in line with many network devices, based around the concept of external and internal facing elements, in this case defined as Greenside and Redside. So the starting point is to define IP addressing schemes for both sides. Thereafter it is a case of setting up server pools, deciding on which Load-Balancing methods to apply, making a handful of performance tweaks (see features section) and you are fully operable. Figure 6 Setting Up Server Pools In addition to logging, statistics and reporting on inbound and outbound traffic in realtime, jetnexus provides extensive alerting facilities for example, via an email alert as well as full SNMP support. The Problem Ownership Angle... The ALB ISO solves one of the biggest support problems relating to software networking products and that is the thorny one of problem ownership. ADC s are critical to the networking and data delivery infrastructure and, as such, if they fail they need to be bought back on line very quickly. The major issue with software-only based products is that, in the event of a problem arising, that problem could be software, OS, OS-software compatibility or the hardware itself. By having the the OS and software integrated, this is simplified so, if the problem is hardware then it s the hardware vendors responsibility, if software then its jetnexus. You don t need a highly skilled Linux engineer to reconfigure the OS and software to get them working together again. Broadband-Testing 1995-2010 7

FEATURES OVERVIEW The focus here is on providing features that potential customers will really use, rather than simply over-engineering a product at great cost to the buyer, stacked with features they will never actually use for load-balancing and Application Delivery Control. Content Caching Performance is clearly a primary requirement for Load-Balancing and application delivery. For this reason, the ALB-X includes Content Caching a features that has typically only been found on dedicated devices or top end application delivery controllers, and then typically as a high-cost option. Figure 7 Setting Cache Performance Metrics The ALB-X ISO makes it really easy to create caching rules based on a number of different variables, such as object type, name and directory. No coding is required and, once created, a rule can be reused wherever it is required. Is it effective? Well, one e- commerce customer of jetnexus has reported that it now serves 94% of all its content from the cache. Not only does this improve performance but also reduces the number of back end servers and subsequent licences required. 8 Broadband-Testing 1995-2010

Layer 7 Load-Balancing Layer 7 load balancing is fundamental to application delivery control, operating, as it does, at the application protocol level. Again, this was a feature absent on lower-priced devices until the likes of jetnexus introduced at an entry-mid level. Key to Layer 7 Load-Balancing is that the device recognises the type of data it is processing - HTTP and HTTPS where the ALB-X is concerned, and consequently allows for many features that are not possible at lower-level Load-Balancing such as URL switching, cookie-based persistence and request scanning. Tie this level of detailed data control into a choice of Load-Balancing strategies, including application persistence methods - Round Robin, Least Number of Connections, IP Sticky and Cookie Sticky and you have a very flexible application delivery methodology to work with. Connection Management In conjunction with Layer 7 optimisation, the ALB-X also supports Connection Management. This is used to optimise the performance of TCP/IP in that it terminates the thousands of TCP connections applications generate at the device, then consolidates them to send far less (effectively bundled) connection requests to the web server. TCP connections are one of the primary killers of server performance placing, as they do, enormous stress levels on the server pool. Connection Management is therefore a fundamental requirement of high performance Load-Balancing and application delivery. Advanced Server Monitoring How do you know if all servers in the pool are operating in full health? Unless you monitor the server pool, it is impossible to know, meaning you could be forwarding large amounts of traffic to a server that is experiencing operational problems, or is simply saturated. For this reason, the ALB-X performs a series of server health checks, from simple ping and TCP tests to full web GETs, to ensure every server is performing as it should. Web Acceleration Another fundamental of data performance optimisation is accelerating web traffic. The ALB-X uses jetnexus compression algorithm to deliver compressed, optimised content in a form that is readable by the browsers. This acceleration is tuneable via the ALB-X management GUI and rule of thumb guidelines are provided by jetnexus to aid with optimising configuration for each particular environment. The accelerator has a number of key features that can be summarised as follows: Efficient acceleration algorithms deliver fast page delivery times even while under significant loads. Broadband-Testing 1995-2010 9

Rule based compression detects and compensates for browser behavioural differences and defects, therefore guaranteeing that accelerated pages can be displayed correctly by the client s browser. Supported by all standard web browsers and requires no client component. Browsers supported include MS IE 4.0+, Netscape 4.0+, Opera and FireFox. Has the ability to accelerate most content including Javascript, AJAZ, XML and other types. Has the ability to accelerate Office Documents (e.g. DOC, XLS, PPT, etc.) and configurable MIME types. Can act on HTTP headers - POSTS, SOAP, HTML, JavaScript, etc. Ability to accelerate HTTP 1.1 through HTTP 1.0 Proxies and Caches (e.g. Squid, MS ISA, etc.). Can accelerate through Personal Firewalls (e.g. Symantec, MacAfee, etc.) Supports streaming compression with full support for chunking. Supports content exclusions - by rule (e.g. /site sub-folder/*.js) or by header added to specific pages. Provides B2B acceleration between any two jetnexus appliances in a multi-point accelerator network. Supports uploaded POST data (not just GETs). Supports web services (server to server) protocols including SOAP. Figure 8 jetnexus ALB-X Acceleration Benefits 10 Broadband-Testing 1995-2010

SSL Offload In conjunction with connection control, terminating SSL (https) requests at the Load- Balancer, rather than at the server SSL offload in other words massively reduces the performance impact on the server pool. Figure 9 Creating An SSL Certificate Past testing by Broadband-Testing has shown that https traffic can generate 10 times more load on the server than regular http traffic. Therefore, by terminating it at the ALB- X device, not only is server performance dramatically improved but it also means that in some cases server consolidation can take place, reducing costs further. This also has major management benefits both from an operational and cost perspective. As well as allowing you to create your own certificates (or request a 3 rd party certificate) directly from the management GUI, the ALB-X also features multi-channel support, with up to 24 simultaneous certificates handled via multiple virtual acceleration engines on the same physical hardware. The product also features what jetnexus calls One Click SSL, whereby a jetnexus channel can be made to run SSL by simply selecting the certificate you want to use and clicking enable. All SSL certificates can be stored on the appliance, simplifying sometimes unorganised and disparate SSL certificate management. Pre-existing certificates from IIS and Apache can also be imported or exported via the management GUI. Broadband-Testing 1995-2010 11

Advanced Reporting/Logging A number of reporting and logging features are available with the ALB-X. Reporting is where many network devices typically come unstuck if it is impossible to get decent statistics out of the device then how do you know if it performing as well as it should be? For example, you can capture live traffic stats to see what levels of content compression, throughput rates and cache performance and view it real-time. Equally, you can monitor the status of the ALB-X device itself. As well as being available in tabular format, a dashboard can be viewed, providing a graphical analysis of current device status, with alert logs and compression performance. Figure 10 ALB-X Dashboard Within the advanced Reporting/logging options, the product also has the capability to automatically copy the web log files onto the file server for more detail third party analysis. 12 Broadband-Testing 1995-2010

SUMMARY & CONCLUSIONS In pre-built appliance mode, the jetnexus ALB-X is the essence of common sense in its own right. However, with the ISO version, in the current climate it really does make sense, extending the undoubted benefits of load-balancing and application control and acceleration to the masses. The ISO version is simplicity itself to install, makes use of servers that are possibly doing time as an emergency coffee table or simply gathering dust in the corner of the data centre and provides a full-on feature set. While the roadmap for jetnexus is geared around adding more functionality at Layer 7, the basic premise of avoiding complexity, maintaining affordability and feature relevance will still be the primary focus and, with the ISO version, this is magnified more than ever. We have not tested any alternative that will offer so much in terms of feature benefits for such as small outlay, both in terms of capital and operational expenditure. As such, it is the first product we ve tested for which we are awarding gold, purely on complete common sense and providing real value for money at a time when IT buyers are looking for that very quality. Broadband-Testing 1995-2010 13