The Cisco CSS 11000 series' hierarchical configuration commands let us pull statistics and know what it is we've got and whether we're running it optimally. The Cisco CSS 11800 switches make more efficient use of Excite's servers, delivering a faster, more reliable download for the site's millions of users. If a user has personalized their portal with stock quote requests on their Excite start page, the Cisco CSS 11000 series switches knows to retrieve the stock quotes from certain servers and not others. Only Cisco CSS 11000 series switches can direct Web traffic based on full visibility of lengthy URLs, host tags, and cookies, no matter where in the HTTP header packet they are embedded. Competing solutions use IP addresses alone or limited URL or cookie information to make load-balancing decisions and suffer degraded performance.
Cisco has a unique approach to managing such resources.
Many also open a session to the server to test specific applications and verify server and content availability. However, these devices can only load balance servers, not the services or distributed content that reside on them. In contrast, Cisco CSS 11000 series switches test server availability using more sophisticated technology that verifies that the content and applications are available, not just the server. In the event of a failed HTTP keep-alive, Cisco directs requests for that particular content or application to another server, keeping the server itself in rotation for all other content, applications, or services. Because Cisco can parse URLs, we're redirecting traffic to a more efficient set of servers optimized for that content.