ArrowPoint Helps 'Excite' Users With Personalized Portal Services.Business/Technology Editors ACTON, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--April 5, 2000 Excite.com, Among the Top Sites On the Web, Chooses ArrowPoint Web Switches to Personalize Its Popular Web Portal Excite@Home's (NASDAQ NASDAQ in full National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations U.S. market for over-the-counter securities. Established in 1971 by the National Association of Securities Dealers (NASD), NASDAQ is an automated quotation system that reports on : ATHM ATHM Excite@Home (NASDAQ symbol) ATHM Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine ATHM American Textile History Museum (Lowell, MA) ) Excite.com, one of the Web's top portal destinations, has deployed ArrowPoint Communications' (NASDAQ: ARPT ARPT Airport ARPT Ateneo Rifle Pistol Team ARPT Adaptive Research Planning Teams ARPT Adenine Phosphoribosyltransferase ARPT Access Region Prediction Table ) Web switches to manage Web content on http://www.excite.com and related co-branded sites. ArrowPoint's Web switches are the only products Excite@Home evaluated that could meet its requirements in the time frame required to support its 30.2 million unique visitors A count of how many different people access a Web site. For example, if a user leaves and comes back to the site five times during the measurement period, that person is counted as one unique visitor, but would count as five "user sessions. in February(a), without negatively impacting any part of the network. In addition, the Web switches have helped Excite.com optimize performance and availability by intelligently directing content to servers optimized to deliver that content. Excite@Home has installed two CS-800 Content Smart(TM) Web Switches at its Redwood, Calif. data center to manage personalized and direct page views, and to distribute Web traffic among its many hundreds of servers. ArrowPoint's Web switches support all of the resource-intensive, dynamic and personalized content on the Excite.com start page, as well as some peripheral cobranded content. The ArrowPoint Web switches enable a more efficient use of Excite's servers, and a faster, more reliable download for the site's millions of users. "ArrowPoint is the first vendor we threw in front of our site that didn't cause major headaches," said Joe Minarik, senior manager of portal and regional network engineering for Excite@Home. "The Web switch's hierarchical configuration commands let us pull statistics and know what it is we've got and whether we're running it optimally. ArrowPoint took the time to understand our needs and worked with us closely to ensure their solution met them." Excited about personalized content delivery ArrowPoint Web switches' full-inspection URL-parsing enables Excite.com to redirect content to servers optimized to deliver that content much more effectively than would be possible if Excite.com were using a traditional load-balancing scheme. If a user whose portal is personalized with stock quotes requests http://www.excite.com, for example, ArrowPoint's Web switch will read the hypertext transfer protocol See HTTP. (protocol) Hypertext Transfer Protocol - (HTTP) The client-server TCP/IP protocol used on the World-Wide Web for the exchange of HTML documents. It conventionally uses port 80. Latest version: HTTP 1.1, defined in RFC 2068, as of May 1997. (HTTP) header, and parse the URL URL in full Uniform Resource Locator Address of a resource on the Internet. The resource can be any type of file stored on a server, such as a Web page, a text file, a graphics file, or an application program. . This allows it to retrieve stock quotes from the servers specifically optimized to deliver them. Only ArrowPoint's Web switches can direct Web traffic based on full visibility of lengthy URLs, host tags and cookies, no matter where in the HTTP header A record sent by clients and servers communicating with each other via the HTTP protocol. The header is a stream of text that may be sent without any content following it or with the content that it describes. packet they are embedded. Competing solutions use IP addresses alone or limited URL or cookie information to make load-balancing decisions. This traditional "content blind" approach stunts Web site architects' efforts to maximize server capacity, personalize content and prioritize content delivery. Smart resource health checking and command line scripting Excite.com is using the CS-800 Web switches' smart resource health checking feature to ensure availability of servers, content and applications. Most load balancers test the availability of Web servers by sending various "keep-alive" messages to the server on a periodic basis to verify the server itself is responding. Opening a session to the server can test specific applications and verify server and content availability, and remove non-functioning servers from the load balancing The fine tuning of a computer system, network or disk subsystem in order to more evenly distribute the data and/or processing across available resources. For example, in clustering, load balancing might distribute the incoming transactions evenly to all servers, or it might redirect them rotation. However, those balancers can only load balance servers, not services or distributed content. In contrast, ArrowPoint Web switches test server availability using more sophisticated technology that verify content and application availability using the particular application's optimum keep-alive method. In the event of a failed HTTP keep-alive, ArrowPoint directs only requests for that particular content or application to another server, keeping the server in rotation for all other content, application, or services it can fulfill. For example, if a Web site's back-end common gateway interface (CGI CGI in full Common Gateway Interface. Specification by which a Web server passes data between itself and an application program. Typically, a Web user will make a request of the Web server, which in turn passes the request to a CGI application program. ) application is not responding, where traditional load balancers would direct all users past that server, ArrowPoint's Web switch keeps the server alive for non-CGI content requests, such as HTTP requests for the site's page. This capability permits customers to ensure they are optimally utilizing all of their available server resources at all times. "Excite.com has built a reputation on innovation and sophistication so·phis·ti·cate v. so·phis·ti·cat·ed, so·phis·ti·cat·ing, so·phis·ti·cates v.tr. 1. To cause to become less natural, especially to make less naive and more worldly. 2. ," said Cheng Wu Cheng Wu (程武; b. 201) was an officer under the Cao Wei of the Three Kingdoms period in China. Cheng Wu was the son of Cheng Yu. Cheng Wu served under Xiahou Mao when fighting against the army under Shu, then having Xiahou Mao surround and then attack Zhao Yun as to , ArrowPoint CEO (1) (Chief Executive Officer) The highest individual in command of an organization. Typically the president of the company, the CEO reports to the Chairman of the Board. and founder. "ArrowPoint worked with Excite.com to develop an architecture that not only will allow Excite.com to scale, but that reinforces Excite's ability to exploit more sophisticated network technology to provide a superior user experience." About ArrowPoint Communications ArrowPoint provides Content Smart(TM) Web switches and WebNS(TM) software that optimize e-commerce and content delivery. Powered with patented "content switching" technology, ArrowPoint solutions are used by e-commerce, content distribution and Web hosting Making a Web site available on the Internet. Many ISPs host a few personal Web pages for an individual at no additional cost above the monthly service fee, but the address is subordinate to the ISP; for example, www.friendlyisp.com/pat_smith. industry leaders to deliver reliable transactions and prioritized services that build lasting, profitable customer relationships. The company is headquartered in Acton, Mass., with worldwide operations throughout North America North America, third largest continent (1990 est. pop. 365,000,000), c.9,400,000 sq mi (24,346,000 sq km), the northern of the two continents of the Western Hemisphere. , Europe, Latin America and the Pacific Rim. For more information, call 978.206.3000 or visit the company Web site at www.arrowpoint.com. (a)Source: Media Metrix March 22, 2000 |
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