Switch technology to impact on layer seventh application layer

Exchange technology is moving in two directions. One Direction is faster and faster, has jumped from the gigabit to the million trillion.

Another direction is from the initial 2-tier exchange to the 3-tier exchange, which has now been developed to the seventh layer of the Network application layer Exchange.

Figuratively speaking, the speed is more and more fast is the route of quantitative change, and the level of exchange is more and more high to go is the route of qualitative change.

How to make full use of bandwidth resources to manage the application and content on the Internet is becoming the focus of service providers. In the case of bandwidth application, the network layer is no longer the key to the problem, instead of improving the level of network services to complete the Internet to intelligent transformation. How to solve the problem of the transport layer to the application layer, the network technology specially for the transport layer to the application layer has become very important, which is the most fundamental reason for the development of the application layer Exchange technology at present.

Application layer Exchange is to realize the recognition of the content by the layer of each packet, and the information of the application layer is identified. To solve the problem of distinguishing application, it is a good way to use network Identification device to forward corresponding traffic according to different application services.

Structure of Application Layer Exchange

Because the application layer information required to complete the above functionality is within the packet, this requires that the content-recognition device peek into the internals of each packet in each session. If the software based architecture is adopted, it can cause severe delay and performance deterioration, and congestion is unavoidable. So all the application layer Exchange technology realized by hardware has gained the technical advantage. Through the application layer switch to achieve all the functions of the high level network, maximize the use of network resources, application layer Exchange to place the application switch in the core layer or the convergence layer, rather than close to the lower level of the intervention layer, so that network managers can better allocate network resources at lower cost is possible.

Structurally, the application-layer switch focuses all functions on a dedicated special application integrated circuit or ASIC. The ASIC is less expensive than traditional routers and is typically distributed over network ports, and includes 50 ASIC in a single device that can support hundreds of interfaces. The new ASIC allows intelligent switches/routers to forward data at very fast speeds on all ports-regardless of the type of network traffic, called the line-speed forwarding application layer traffic.

In terms of high availability and load balancing, there are many advanced tools that can take advantage of application-level information returned by applications to end users. Not only can users verify that the correct content is being sent, but they can also open the packets sent over the network and make a load balancing decision based on the information in the package.

This intelligent migration transcends the fourth level of functionality. Devices with up to layer fourth capabilities do not recognize the different types of transport flows that flow through this port, so they treat all transport flows equally.

But the transmission stream is not all the same. For a load-balanced product, it is useful to know whether the data flowing through this port is streaming or a simple request for a product in the catalog, and perhaps the merchant wants to give higher priority to customers who need this directory entry. Many devices with layer fourth functionality treat both types of data in the same way, and thus may send streaming media data to a server that cannot respond, resulting in incorrect information and latency.

and the seventh layer of intelligence can be further controlled, that is, all the transmission flow and content control. Part of the function of this class of products with the seventh level of cognition is to ensure that different types of transmission flow can be assigned different priorities. A device with layer seventh awareness does not rely on routing devices or applications to identify the transport flow of differentiated services, common open policy services, or other QoS agreements, which filters and assigns priority to the transport stream. This eliminates the need to rely on applications or network devices to achieve these goals. The seventh layer Exchange can achieve efficient data flow optimization and intelligent load balancing.

Application Range

In Internet, intranet, and extranet networks, application-tier switches have great ambitions.

Internet applications-Business to consumer E-commerce, online customer support, server load balancing, user prioritization and control, adaptive redundancy-state failure recovery, electronic transaction processing assurance, gigabytes rate bandwidth management, etc.

Intranet applications-personnel planning and construction, marketing automation, customer service, firewall load balancing, optimal server traffic orientation, move request processing, content and transaction prioritization, and accelerated content provisioning with Web site caching.

Extranet Applications-Enterprise to Enterprise E-commerce, supply chain automation, sales/service channel interaction, global server load Balancing, access control, advanced traffic management for E-commerce, content filtering and bandwidth management.

XML is the only option in an era of electronic commerce that seeks to unify data. In order to quickly and correctly handle each piece of data flowing through the network, the purpose of XML exchange is to deal with XML data, the challenge of XML exchange is to quickly and correctly handle every piece of data that flows through, it is also a kind of exchange based on application layer.