Introduction

The Internet has grown to the point where its value transcends IP connectivity for the support of Web pages, e-mail, and other applications. Businesses now look to the Web for high-performance, reliable transport for bandwidth-intensive applications, and multimedia content such as everything over IP (XoIP), e-commerce transactions, special events, news, and even entertainment services. Content switching is a method to remove delays that might occur in the transport of data across a network. This chapter deals with the technology that allows this to occur and with the dangers the user may face with corruption of data, and why, by using the products described in the following pages, they should be protected from such corruption.

Overview of Cisco Content Services Switch

The Content Services Switch (CSS) uses content switching to intelligently redirect service requests to the most appropriate server. The key difference between load balancing and content switching is that content switching makes decisions based on information from Layers 4 through 7 (including URLs, host tags, and cookies) instead of just Layer 4 information (IP addresses and port numbers) such as LocalDirector and DistributedDirector.

Some of you might know this product as the ArrowPoint Content Smart Switch (the CCS login screen still mentions ArrowPoint). Cisco Systems acquired ArrowPoint Communications in June 2000 and incorporated their products and technology into Cisco's product range.

A common implementation of this technology is for a service provider to have two types of Web services. The first service is for contracted Service Level Agreement...