As web access proliferates domestic, institutional, and commercial life, websites designed just last year may now be facing an overwhelming crush from an increasingly demanding audience. Internet market researchers and strategic consultants at Zona Research, Inc. estimate that IP traffic doubles every 3 months.
Popular websites can experience unpredictably high peaks at any time of the day or night.
Assuring site availability requires more than just stacking in more servers. Phobos, which will become the Salt Lake City operations of SonicWALL, generated more than 16 patents. The IN-Switch server card is a load balancing switch on a PCI card that can be installed in one web server to balance internet traffic across a cluster. The switch can be embedded directly into a host server running enterprise network operating systems such as Windows NT and Linux. The load-balancing hardware does not increase server processing overhead and supports up to 8,192 server IP addresses.