Terms

The Px series application switch can examine actual user requests, rather than simply forwarding the requests to the servers. You can use the powerful array of tools provided by the Px series application switch to scale websites by:

•Creating special purpose servers

•Making better use of web caches

•Allowing movement of web content without extensive re-linking of the site

The Px series application switch creates a level of abstraction between the real servers and the Internet, by configuring a virtual IP (VIP) address and port on the application switch. The VIP has a globally-reachable public IP address, and corresponds to the DNS entry for the website. All traffic for the website is sent to the application switch, which applies policies to decide how to forward the traffic to a real server.

Figure 1-1 shows several Internet users all connecting to the website www.busy.com.