Cache for The Cause Load balancing can spread user demand over servers and data centers. It can even connect the user to the closest available server. But traffic flow to end users can still be clobbered by congestion on the public Internet. That's particularly true during Web rush hours when users log on to view or participate in a special event. An example was Euro2000, Europe's championship soccer tournament held this spring in Brussels.
Caches are special servers that hold the data that users request most from a given site.
Calif. Sportal deployed Cisco Web switches at Sportal's main data center in Los Angeles and at a backup center in London and configured the servers at both data centers to redirect traffic to the caches. That, Pearson says, made it possible to honor requests very quickly. Moreover, Pearson set his Web servers to automatically refresh the caches anytime data on the server changed, so content was always fresh. That's important because caches generally are set to fetch the most frequently requested Web pages at predetermined intervals, resulting in a mixture of old and new data in a cache. Thousands of users could be looking for the same information or performing the same transactions at the same time and place.