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Zeus puts lightning into traffic management
By Jeff Feinman

April 7, 2009 — If a company takes on the same name as the mighty king of the gods in Greek mythology, it better be able to deliver the goods.

UK-based Zeus Technology seems to believe it is up to the task. The company is a provider of application traffic management software, aimed at accelerating Web applications as they are deployed to servers or cloud and virtualized environments.

Zeus’ main attraction is the Zeus Extensible Traffic Manager (ZXTM), a load balancer for Web servers and application servers. ZXTM can inspect and rewrite an entire application stream, decrypt all SSL-encrypted traffic, and cache HTTP responses, according to Zeus executives.

“ZXTM can offload some of the compute work from the application,” said Owen Garrett, a product manager with Zeus. “We have a finely tuned and optimized SSL stack, for example. We can cache content on the load balancer, irrespective of whether it’s static or dynamic content.”

ZXTM can also provide information on the availability of back-end servers and automatically adjust load balancing, Garrett said.

There is a scripting language built into ZXTM called TrafficScript, which can help a user specify how he or she wants network traffic to be handled. TrafficScript’s language syntax is similar to Java and Perl, and is easy to use, Zeus claimed. The language can configure ZXTM to inspect incoming requests from the Internet, send it to a particular set of servers, and retry the request if an error was detected.

“TrafficScript allows you to control how the traffic manager works, so it can rewrite requests and responses, and control how they’re routed,” Garrett said. “The icing on the cake is that you can also give us traffic management policies written in Java. So you can do virtually anything to your traffic as it flows across your network, just by capturing it in the load balancer and running a Java server applet against it.”

Zeus was founded in 1995 and keeps its corporate headquarters in Cambridge, England. The company also has offices in Santa Clara, Calif. and Rome, Italy. One of the company’s first offerings was the Zeus Web Server, a commercial Web server. Zeus then used the Web server technology to create the ZXTM load balancer, Garrett said.

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