Companies stress application availability, streaming media support with upgraded devices.
F5's Big-IP Controller 4.0 is designed to help enterprise network users make their Web sites or critical intranet applications more available to users, while letting companies monitor the usage of their sites or applications. The box competes with load-balancing, Web switching and caching products from CacheFlow, Cisco, Nortel Networks, Top Layer and others. Version 4.0 includes new technology that works with the HTTP 1.1 keep-alive features native to Web servers to consolidate requests for multiple Web page objects into one TCP connection. This process is aimed at squeezing bandwidth usage and reducing the risk of a server crash due to an overload of TCP connections. 3DNS can be used to redirect Web traffic to a back-up domain when a site becomes overwhelmed.