A practical guide to the design and deployment of content switching solutions for mission-critical applications in data center environments

• Design and deploy content switching solutions in the data center using this definitive guide
• Learn about various content switching design approaches with implementation details, requirements for each solution, and design caveats
• Examine detailed case studies that include configuration examples based on deployed content switching solutions
• Explore scaling server load balancing within the data center, integrated data center design, and GSLB using DNS or IP
• Assists network administrators in managing their content switching solutions

With the advent of e-commerce and Internet-accessible applications, more and more enterprises and service providers rely on data center services to grow their businesses. Content switching solutions, such as load balancing, caching, and disaster recovery for applications, are an essential data center technology and a key to helping businesses run in an efficient and redundant fashion. Understanding content switching solutions is a must for network designers, engineers, and administrators who need to scale their networks to meet the demands of their business.

Designing Content Switching Solutions helps you understand content switching solutions using Cisco® content switching products. You’ll get a thorough grounding in the theories and concepts behind content switching and then examine specific solutions through case studies. The case studies in Designing Content Switching Solutions emulate real-world scenarios for the solutions covering some of the common features and functionality deployed in production networks.

Designing Content Switching Solutions begins by introducing you to server load balancing (SLB), load balancing HTTP, VPNs, firewalls, and migrations between SLB devices. From there, you move to Secure Socket Layer (SSL) using Cisco products, including providing end-to-end encryption from client to server using backend SSL. Later chapters explore advanced techniques, such as how to provide distributed data center solutions using global server load balancing (GSLB) and how to conduct scaling and integration of SLB with SSL and GSLB.

Intended for data center architects and managers, network engineers, network administrators, and project managers, Designing Content Switching Solutions shows you the best practices for each content switching solution, enabling you to design and deploy the most critical content switching solutions in the data center.

About The Author

Zeeshan Naseh, CCIE (#6838), is a Technical Leader in Cisco's Advanced Technologies Services Group, focusing on content switching and data centers. He has designed content switching environments for major Cisco Enterprise and Service Provider customers.

Haroon Khan, CCIE No. 4530, is a network design consultant in the Cisco Advanced Technologies Services Group, focusing on content switching, security, and data center design. He has helped design content switching environments for major Cisco Enterprise and Service Provider customers.

Customer Reviews & Comments
Content Switching is the placing of a smart switch between the communications channel and the processing systems. The biggest application is Server Load Balancing. This is used when the activity on a web site becomes more than one server can handle. The idea is that you put in the switch where the high speed line comes in. Then you plug in multiple servers on the other side. The switch looks at the content of the incomming messages and sends the consecutive http requests to different servers. There are, of course, other types of content that needs switching, but web load balancing is the big application. The current Cisco switches are quite complex systems that monitor what each server is doing (i.e. response time) and then sends the http request to the fastest responding server which is usually the server with the lowest load. They can also monitor when a server goes down and stop sending requests to that server. This book is published by Cisco Press, as you might guess, it is heavily oriented to Cisco equipment. This is not a serious problem as Cisco is probably the biggest supplier, and the philosophy described in the book is fairly common over the other brands of equipment. The book is clearly written and at the right level for a person suddenly faced with a workload problem on a web server. Comment | Permalink | (Report this)