Switching Santa's Cookies: ArrowPoint Web Switches Deliver the Goods for toysmart.com, the Web's Leading Site for 'Good Toys'.Business/Technology Editors ACTON, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 20, 1999 ArrowPoint to manage holiday traffic 'tsunami' with unbreakable connections for shoppers, making scalable e-commerce child's play child's play n. 1. Something very easy to do. 2. A trivial matter. child's play Noun Informal something that is easy to do Noun 1. for toysmart.com Online toy seller toysmart.com is implementing ArrowPoint Communications' Web switches and e-commerce content services to solve a perennial e-commerce problem: managing the heavy influx of holiday shoppers that tax the network. Like many e-commerce sites, toysmart.com does a large percentage of its business in the last quarter of the calendar year. To cope, many Web sites implement temporary just-in-time capacity improvements to handle the anticipated deluge of site traffic. This year, toysmart.com has installed two ArrowPoint Content Smart(TM) CS-800 Web Switches to intelligently scale its site using the "cookies" embedded in its users' uniform resource locators See URL. (World-Wide Web) Uniform Resource Locator - (URL, previously "Universal") A standard way of specifying the location of an object, typically a web page, on the Internet. Other types of object are described below. (URLs) and secure socket layer (SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) The leading security protocol on the Internet. Developed by Netscape, SSL is widely used to do two things: to validate the identity of a Web site and to create an encrypted connection for sending credit card and other personal data. ) session IDs. In addition to more efficiently utilizing toysmart.com's servers, cookie switching - managing site traffic using cookies - ensures "sticky connections" between the site's customers and more than 30 servers, even across the problematic divide between secure and non-secure delivery protocols. This ensures that toysmart.com's holiday shoppers will experience smooth, error-free browsing and unbreakable connections from the moment they log on until the final point of sale, without losing their electronic "shopping carts." "We are going to be using the Web switches to do 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 , server selection and user selection. In other words Adv. 1. in other words - otherwise stated; "in other words, we are broke" put differently , we're going to be looking at cookies to decide which server is most appropriate for a particular user and also to identify caching servers," said John Puckett, toysmart.com's chief information officer. "The primary reason we selected ArrowPoint is to provide increased capacity without having to add lots and lots of boxes, because we're using the existing servers more intelligently and keeping bandwidth directly under our control, as opposed to shared." ArrowPoint's e-commerce content services suite introduces first-ever solutions to the kind of performance and security problems toysmart.com has overcome, problems that have hindered e-commerce by frustrating customers and jeopardizing - or losing - business. The suite equips e-commerce sites and their application hosting providers with new capabilities that provide significantly improved levels of speed, reliability and scalability, helping merchants achieve site differentiation, personalization, customer retention and "word of mouth" customer acquisition. ArrowPoint's is the only product that can recognize Internet protocol See Internet and TCP/IP. (networking) Internet Protocol - (IP) The network layer for the TCP/IP protocol suite widely used on Ethernet networks, defined in STD 5, RFC 791. IP is a connectionless, best-effort packet switching protocol. (IP) address, address range, URLs for specific content, user cookies hundreds of bytes long, and SSL session IDs. Using this intelligence to select the best server to fulfill a specific user's request for specific content, the Web switches will also reduce latency (processing time) between back-end databases, lightweight directory access protocol (protocol) Lightweight Directory Access Protocol - (LDAP) A protocol for accessing on-line directory services. LDAP was defined by the IETF in order to encourage adoption of X.500 directories. (LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) A protocol used to access a directory listing. LDAP support is implemented in Web browsers and e-mail programs, which can query an LDAP-compliant directory. ) servers and Web servers - a key component in reliability as well as scalability. They also ensure toysmart.com will have large amounts of bandwidth capacity to handle what Puckett calls the "tsunami" requirements of the holiday period. Intelligently scaling toysmart.com's site means the ArrowPoint Web switches must be armed with content replication for dealing with flash crowds or traffic spikes. But they also have the intelligence to recognize the difference between flash crowds and common denial-of-service attacks such as smurfs, SYN floods, ping floods and ".c" attacks. This is important to toysmart.com because high traffic volume - often in sudden bursts - is the lifeblood life·blood n. 1. Blood regarded as essential for life. 2. An indispensable or vital part: Capable workers are the lifeblood of the business. of e-commerce. ArrowPoint's Web switches also give toysmart.com the flexibility to enable varied Web-to-network configurations. This allows toysmart.com to add or remove Web or caching servers and other network devices in real time based on site and market data, without making major changes to the basic architecture, and without disrupting service. "So basically the Web switch allows us to do open-heart surgery open-heart surgery Any surgical procedure opening the heart and exposing one or more of its chambers, most often to repair valve disease or correct congenital heart malformations (see congenital heart disease). on a marathon runner without having to take him out of the race," Puckett said. Holiday cookies - a sweet deal for e-tailers E-commerce sites need to balance their requirements for both high site performance and transaction security. This is often accomplished by using 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 HTTP in full HyperText Transfer Protocol Standard application-level protocol used for exchanging files on the World Wide Web. HTTP runs on top of the TCP/IP protocol. ) for the "shopping" component of their traffic and processing-intensive encrypted SSL connections for credit card purchases. However, ensuring a pleasant shopping experience depends on a site's ability to keep an individual shopper connected to the same server throughout his or her online shopping trip - otherwise, their shopping cart can be lost. ArrowPoint introduces two innovations - cookie switching and hybrid transaction binding - that ensure shopping carts are never lost regardless of an e-commerce site's traffic mix. To make their online stores easier to use, e-commerce sites send cookies - small HTTP data strings, or packets - from their servers to their users' Web browsers The following is a list of web browsers. Historical Historically important browsers In order of release:
ArrowPoint's Web switches can perform the "cookie switching" that enables reliable e-transaction processing for non-secure site traffic and delivery of personalized and premium site services. ArrowPoint Web switches read full URLs and dynamically find user cookies embedded anywhere in HTTP headers HTTP Headers form the core of a HTTP request, and are very important in a HTTP response. They define various characteristics of the data that is requested or the data that has been provided. to deliver cookie-based sticky connections. All of this ensures users are not load-balanced away from a Web server in mid-transaction. ArrowPoint's cookie switching ends frustration over lost shopping carts or vanishing information forms, even when users enter a site from popular mega-proxies that assign multiple IP addresses during users' shopping sessions. Cookie switching also enables scalable delivery of premium services for preferred customers as well as personalized content offerings and applications. With traditional load balancing technology, establishing a new SSL session breaks the shopper's original server connection, causing his or her shopping cart to vanish. ArrowPoint's hybrid transaction binding maintains "stickiness" when toysmart.com's users move from cookie-based "shopping" connections to SSL-based "purchasing" connections, permitting toysmart.com to optimally balance both performance and security needs, and eliminating dropped shopping carts that could potentially create costly service disruption and loss of customer goodwill. ArrowPoint architecture not playing games with toysmart.com's traffic ArrowPoint's architecture uses a balance of centralized and distributed resources for the two key parts of the job: flow set-up and flow forwarding. The only Web switch built from the ground up for Web traffic, ArrowPoint's Web switches marry substantial centralized symmetric multiprocessing See SMP. (parallel) symmetric multiprocessing - (SMP) Two or more similar processors connected via a high-bandwidth link and managed by one operating system, where each processor has equal access to I/O devices. and memory resources needed for flow setup and "rules processing" with distributed ASIC-based processors for wire-speed forwarding of Web flows, all in a single platform. This speeds toysmart.com's site performance, ensuring consistently positive customer experiences for attracting and retaining customers. "With built-in redundancy for fail-over built into their architecture and flash crowd insurance services, ArrowPoint Web switches are optimized for the unpredictable bursts of tens of thousands of transactions and millions of hits that characterize e-commerce Web traffic, especially at this time of year," said ArrowPoint founder and 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. 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 . About toysmart.com toysmart.com celebrates the joys of childhood, parenting and learning through play. toysmart.com believes learning is an interactive process enriched through the use of "good toys" - the ones that inspire, enlighten and endure in a child's mind. Building awareness and community around good toys, toysmart.com is the on-line champion of kids. Based in Waltham, Mass., toysmart.com provides thousands of toys, children's products, learning tools and invaluable resources for parents, caregivers and educators through our interactive Web site. For more information, visit http://www.toysmart.com or call (781) 663-2700. About ArrowPoint Communications ArrowPoint Communications has pioneered Web switching Using a Web switch to route Web traffic to the server that can process it most efficiently. See Web switch. , the next generation networking Next Generation Networking (NGN) is a broad term to describe some key architectural evolutions in telecommunication core and access networks that will be deployed over the next 5-10 years. technology that optimizes Web response times and reliability for a consistently positive user experience. ArrowPoint's products are used in a broad range of applications, including electronic commerce, Web publishing Creating a Web site and placing it on the Web server. A Web site is a collection of HTML pages with the home page typically named INDEX.HTML. Web sites are designed using Web authoring software which provides a graphical layout capability or by hand coding in HTML or both. , Web caching and value-added Web hosting services A web hosting service is a type of Internet hosting service that allows individuals and organizations to provide their own websites accessible via the World Wide Web. Web hosts are companies that provide space on a server they own for use by their clients as well as providing . The company is headquartered in Acton, Mass., with regional offices in Alton, Hampshire, United Kingdom and Singapore. For more information, call 978.206.3200 or visit the company Web site at www.arrowpoint.com. |
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