InformationWeek

December 8, 1997

Improving Traffic Flows

Resonate sends WAN, LAN traffic over fastest path

esonate Inc. this week will release a software architecture and products that will let customers send network traffic over the optimal route.

The company's Global Dispatch product will optimize WAN traffic by automatically measuring response times between clients and servers and directing traffic over the most efficient route. In contrast, conventional routers now generally send traffic over the route with the lowest number of "hops," regardless of whether or not that route is the fastest one.

Resonate's Central Dispatch provides the same type of optimization between any TCP/IP-based client and server, including a Web server, while Application Dispatch provides that service between clients and application servers. If, for example, a database server is down or is particularly slow, Application Dispatch can direct a request to another da tabase server.

All three products are available separately; by early next year, all three will work together over the IntelliFlow Architecture. "This will provide true enterprise traffic management," says Mike Schafir, VP of marketing at Resonate, in Mountain View, Calif. "It will layer intelligence across the whole infrastructure."

David Kearney, president of Boomerang Information Services Inc., an electronic-communications service bureau in Palo Alto, Calif., is using Resonate Central Dispatch traffic rerouting capabilities to provide a form of fault-tolerance for users accessing the company's three Web servers. "If one machine crashes, another will automatically pick up the slack," he says. "Nobody gets slow service."

Balancing The Load
John Rezner, VP of operations at GeoCities, a Santa Monica, Calif., company that provides online communities, also uses Central Dispatch for its Web servers. In addition, the company is looking at mirroring servers across its WAN-one server on each coast-and using Global Dispatch to balance the load between the two servers based on the location of the request. "That should increase performance by intelligently routing traffic based on where the data is located," Rezner says. "We don't know of any other product that can do this."

Global Dispatch, Central Dispatch, and Application Dispatch are available now, priced at $35,000, $10,000, and $5,000, respectively.

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