TCP/IP Tutorial and Technical Overview - IBM Redbooks

The Internet business has grown so rapidly that continuous availability of
mission-critical data and applications residing on servers is a very important
requirement for enterprises. The Internet challenges companies to develop new
strategies for increasing revenue and providing detailed product and delivery
information. The result raises client and business partner satisfaction. Also, the
management of enterprises' internal business processes that are accessed
through the Internet by the workforce must be better optimized.
Increasing demands from client, business partners, and employees for access to
applications and data are challenges for the development of new server and
networking strategies and services. Consider the following three main aspects:
► How can availability to an enterprise's information be made available 24
hours a day and 7 days a week?
► How can these services also be guaranteed even if the number of
transactions increases very rapidly, for example, because of a spike in client
or business partner inquiries?
► How can the access to server applications and data be shared among parallel
installed servers?
The answers are availability, scalability, and load balancing. In this chapter, we
discuss techniques that can be employed to achieve availability, scalability, and
load balancing. We discuss each technique at a fairly high level.
908 TCP/IP Tutorial and Technical Overview