The state of the art in locally distributed Web-server systems

This Web page contains update information about Web clusters and products as described in the paper:
Commercial products and research prototypes are classified as follows: The latter class of architectures differs from the previous ones in that the Virtual IP address is not assigned to a single front-end device (i.e., the Web switch) but shared by all server nodes.

Commercial products and research prototypes based on a layer-4 Web switch

Table 1 classifies some commercial products and research prototypes that work at the TCP/IP layer. Some products appear in multiple table entries because they can be configured to support more than one request routing mechanism.

Table 1: Layer-4 Web clusters.
Two-way One-way
Packet double-rewriting Packet single-rewriting Packet tunneling Packet forwarding
Cisco's LocalDirector  [8] TCP Router  [12] Linux Virtual Server  [19] IBM Network Dispatcher  [17]
Magicrouter [2]     Linux Virtual Server  [19]
Linux Virtual Server  [19]       F5 Networks' BIG-IP  [13]
LSNAT [27]     LSMAC  [15]
F5 Networks' BIG-IP  [13]     Intel's NetStructure Traffic Director [18]*
Foundry Networks' ServerIron [14]     Nortel Networks' Alteon 180 [23]
IBM Network Dispatcher  [17]     Radware's WSD Pro [25]
Coyote Point's Equalizer  [10]     Foundry Networks'ServerIron [14]
Allot's NetBalancer [1]     ONE-IP [11]

* Intel has announced the discontinuation of this product line.

Commercial products and research prototypes based on a layer-7 Web switch

Table 2 classifies the cluster-based Web systems that work at the application layer. Some products listed herein have already been considered in Table 1 as they can be configured to support both layer-4 and layer-7 routing mechanisms.

Table 2: Layer-7 Web clusters.
Two-way One-way
TCP gateway TCP splicing TCP handoff TCP connection hop
IBM Network Dispatcher proxy-level CBR  [17] Nortel Networks' Alteon Web OS  [23] ScalaServer [5,24] Resonate's Central Dispatch [26]
CluBWeb [7] Lucent's Web Switch  [9,20] [28]  
HACC [32] Cisco's CSS [8] CluBWeb [3]  
  Foundry Networks' ServerIron [14]    
  F5 Networks' BIG-IP [13]    
  Radware's WSD Pro [25]      
  Zeus's Load Balancer [31]    
  L5 [4]    
  [30]    
  Array Networks' Array 500 [6]    
  IBM Network Dispatcher kernel-level CBR [17]    


Commercial products and research prototypes for virtual Web clusters

Table 3 classifies the virtual Web clusters on the basis of the MAC address assignment to the server nodes.

Table 3: Virtual Web clusters.
Unicast MAC address Multicast MAC address
Microsoft Network Load Balancing  [21] Microsoft Network Load Balancing  [21]
[29]  


References

1
Allot Communications Ltd.
http://www.allot.com/

2
E. Anderson, D. Patterson, and E. Brewer.
The Magicrouter, an application of fast packet interposing.
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~eanders/projects/magicrouter/, May 1996.

3
M. Andreolini, E. Casalicchio, M. Colajanni, and M. Mambelli.
Performance analysis of layer-7 switches for cluster-based Web servers.
Technical Report RR-01.24, Univ. of Rome Tor Vergata, Computer Engineering Dept., Nov. 2001.
http://www.ce.uniroma2.it/hiperweb/

4
G. Apostolopoulos, D. Aubespin, V. Peris, P. Pradhan, and D. Saha.
Design, implementation and performance of a content-based switch.
In Proceedings of the 19th IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM 2000), pages 1117-1126, Tel-Aviv, Israel, Mar. 2000.
http://www.ieee-infocom.org/2000/papers/440.ps

5
M. Aron, P. Druschel, and Z. Zwaenepoel.
Efficient support for P-HTTP in cluster-based Web servers.
In Proceedings of the 1999 USENIX Annual Technical Conference, pages 185-198, Monterey, CA, June 1999.
http://www.cs.rice.edu/CS/Systems/ScalaServer/

6
Array Networks Inc.
http://www.arraynetworks.net/

7
E. Casalicchio and M. Colajanni.
A client-aware dispatching algorithm for Web clusters providing multiple services.
In Proceedings of the 10th International World Wide Web Conference, pages 535-544, Hong Kong, May 2001.
http://www10.org/cdrom/papers/434/

8
Cisco Systems Inc.
http://www.cisco.com/

9
A. Cohen, S. Rangarajan, and H. Slye.
On the performance of TCP splicing for URL-aware redirection.
In Proceedings of the 2nd USENIX Symposium on Internet Technologies and Systems, Boulder, CO, Oct. 1999.
http://www.usenix.org/events/usits99/cohen.html

10
Coyote Point Systems Inc.
http://www.coyotepoint.com.

11
O. P. Damani, P. E. Chung, Y. Huang, C. Kintala, and Y.-M. Wang.
ONE-IP: Techniques for hosting a service on a cluster of machines.
Computer Networks, 29(8-13):1019-1027, 1997.
http://www.scope.gmd.de/info/www6/technical/paper196/paper196.html

12
D. M. Dias, W. Kish, R. Mukherjee, and R. Tewari.
A scalable and highly available Web server.
In Proceedings of the 41st IEEE Computer Society International Conference, pages 85-92, San Jose, CA, Feb. 1996.
http://researchweb.watson.ibm.com/webvideo/compcon96.ps

13
F5 Networks Inc.
http://www.f5labs.com/

14
Foundry Networks Inc.
http://www.foundrynet.com/products/webswitches/serveriron/

15
X. Gan and B. Ramamurthy.
LSMAC: An improved load sharing network service dispatcher.
World Wide Web, 3(1):53-59, Jan. 2000.
http://www.kluweronline.com/issn/1386-145X

16
G. S. Hunt, G. D. H. Goldszmidt, R. P. King, and R. Mukherjee.
Network Dispatcher: A connection router for scalable Internet services.
Computer Networks, 30(1-7):347-357, 1998.
http://www7.scu.edu.au/programme/fullpapers/1899/com1899.htm

17
IBM.
IBM WebSphere Edge Server.
http://www.ibm.com/software/webservers/edgeserver/

18
Intel.
Intel NetStructure.
http://www.intel.com/support/netstructure/traffic/
Note that Intel has announced the discontinuation of this product line.

19
Linux Virtual Server project.
http://www.linuxvirtualserver.org/

20
Lucent Technologies.
Lucent Web Switch.
http://www.bell-labs.com/project/webswitch/

21
Microsoft.
Network Load Balancing.
http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000/techinfo/howitworks/cluster/nlb.asp

22
NetScaler Inc.
Netscaler's Request Switch.
http://www.netscaler.com/

23
Nortel Networks Ltd.
Nortel Networks Web OS.
http://www.nortelnetworks.com/products/01/alteon/

24
V. S. Pai, M. Aron, G. Banga, M. Svendsen, P. Druschel, W. Zwaenepoel, and E. M. Nahum.
Locality-aware request distribution in cluster-based network servers.
In Proceedings of the 8th ACM Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems, pages 205-216, San Jose, CA, Oct. 1998.
http://www.cs.rice.edu/CS/Systems/ScalaServer/

25
Radware Inc.
http://www.radware.com/

26
Resonate Inc.
http://www.resonate.com/

27
P. Srisuresh and D. Gan.
Load sharing using IP Network Address Translation.
RFC 2391, Aug. 1998.
ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/rfc2391.txt/

28
W. Tang, L. Cherkasova, L. Russell, and M. W. Mutka.
Modular TCP handoff design in STREAMS-based TCP/IP implementation.
In Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Networking, Lecture Notes in Computer Science 2049, pages 71-80, Colmar, France, July 2001.
http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Lucy_Cherkasova/papers/

29
S. Vaidya, K. Christensen.
A single system image server cluster using duplicated MAC and IP addresses.
In Proceedings of the IEEE 26th Conference on Local Computer Networks, pages 206-214, Tampa, FL, Nov. 2001.
http://www.csee.usf.edu/~christen/lcn01_1.pdf

30
C.-S. Yang and M.-Y. Luo.
A content placement and management system for distributed Web-server systems.
In Proceedings of the 20th IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems, pages 691-698, Taipei, Taiwan, Apr. 2000.
http://www.computer.org/proceedings/icdcs/0601/06010691abs.htm

31
Zeus Technologies Ltd.
http://www.zeus.com/

32
X. Zhang, M. Barrientos, J. B. Chen, and M. Seltzer.
HACC: An architecture for cluster-based Web servers.
In Proceedings of the 3rd USENIX Windows NT Symposium, pages 155-164, Seattle, WA, July 1999.
http://www.usenix.org/publications/library/proceedings/usenix-nt99/zhang.html

Maintained by Valeria Cardellini
Last updated: February 21, 2003.