3 Ways to Use Riverbed SteelApp Traffic Manager

By Riverbed Technology Guest Blog 1_2

In the first article in this series, I used the example of a call center to show how an ADC (application delivery controller) or traffic manager helps to control the traffic flow in and out of applications. In this second installment, we will look at how a powerful ADC such as Riverbed SteelApp gives you much greater availability, performance and control of your application services.

Riverbed SteelApp Traffic Manager can be used to control the delivery of critical business applications and services. Whether those are external services, websites, APIs, email or internal services—such as intranets, Lync or SharePoint—Riverbed SteelApp Traffic Manager gives users three main benefits: availability, speed and control.

1. Availability and resiliency of services

Riverbed SteelApp balances workloads and allows you to scale the capacity of your services as the traffic load changes. App availability and cloud “outages” were a major concern in recent years, with journalists eager to highlight the latest brand to be unavailable to users.

An ADC such as SteelApp Traffic Manager can help alleviate those availability issues with the use of sophisticated load-balancing techniques that allow for server failures to be isolated. Advanced features including Global Load Balancing allow traffic to be routed to the nearest application instance that is available. With Auto-Scaling, ADC instances and application instances can be deployed or removed to match user demand, based on certain parameters.

This means you can have confidence that you can support that global marketing campaign the new marketing director wants to run to drive traffic to your site or app, knowing that you will make the front page for only the right reasons (and not because you have become the latest cloud-based website failure).

2. Speed up web applications

Riverbed SteelApp helps to speed up web applications with content caching and offloading of various tasks to let web servers continue building web pages. Our protocol optimizations give you a better level of service, and you can support more customers per fixed unit of infrastructure capacity—more bang for your buck. Meanwhile, TrafficScript lets you inspect and modify requests and responses on the fly, scrubbing out sensitive information in responses for data privacy or blocking particular requests that you know may cause problems for your application.

Response times feed into Google rankings, and there is considerable evidence that a faster response from a web page or e-commerce site can bring more users and lead to lower abandonment rates and higher levels of sales conversion.

3. Control how users access services

To enhance customer experience for loyal customers, you can conditionally set parameters such as bandwidth limits and rate shaping, to apply different priorities to different types of traffic. For example, you can give your “Gold” users a higher level of service, in preference to “Silver” or “Bronze” customers.

Wouldn’t you want to prioritize those site visitors with products in their virtual shopping basket and give them the best experience possible?

The strength of an ADC such as Riverbed SteelApp comes from its ability to control how applications are delivered so your end users get the experience that you want them to, whatever workload the application is under and wherever end users are based—in one cloud region or across a number of clouds and data centers.

Riverbed SteelApp Traffic Manager is available in two forms:

And our Developer Edition allows you to use Riverbed SteelApp Traffic Manager completely free within your test and development environments to support the applications that you’re building before you put them into production.

Find out more, and download your free trial here.

Nick Vale is senior manager, SteelApp Product Marketing at Riverbed Technology. Guest blogs such as this one are published monthly and are part of Talkin’ Cloud’s annual platinum sponsorships.