Stingray: Use Case for Application Delivery Controller

This is part 2 of the Joyent-Riverbed guest blog series on Stingray Traffic Manager. In the previous post I mentioned how successful Joyent customers have been using Stingray. Now we want to explore those use cases and help demonstrate the diversity of the solution.

3 Ways to use Riverbed Stingray Traffic Manager

Guest Post by Paul Wallace at Riverbed

In the first article in this series, I used the example of a call center to show how an ADC 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 Stingray gives you much greater availability, performance and control of your application services.

Riverbed Stingray 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 - intranets, Lync, SharePoint - Riverbed Stingray Traffic Manager gives users three main benefits, Availability, Speed and Control:

1 - Availability and resiliency of services

Riverbed Stingray balances workloads and allows you to scale the capacity of your services. Riverbed Stingray TrafficScript is a powerful scripting language, which lets you specify precisely what capabilities should be used for each individual user request. You can control load balancing and writing, specifying which groups of servers should handle which types of traffic.

$url = http.getPath();if(string.endsWith($url,".jsp")) {  $cookie = http.getCookie("Priority");  if(cookie == "high") {    pool.use("high-priority");  } else {    pool.use("low-priority");  }}

2 – Speed Up Web Applications

Riverbed Stingray helps to speed up web applications with content caching and offloading of various tasks to let web servers on 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 bangs for your buck. Meanwhile, TrafficScript also 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.

3 - Control how users access services

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

So the strength of an ADC like Riverbed Stingray comes from its ability to control how applications are delivered. Riverbed Stingray Traffic Manager is available from Joyent in three forms:

  • As a virtual appliance that can be deployed from your Joyent customer portal
  • As a software that can be deployed with your Joyent Smart Data Center private cloud deployment
  • As a standalone software to be installed in your data center on your servers

For more information on Riverbed Stingray – Click Here

For more information on using Stingray as a Content Delivery Cloud (alternative to CDN) – Click Here



Post written by Paul Wallace, Riverbed