EXCLUSIVE: Zeus Extensible Traffic Manager 7400

Rules make the ZXTM very versatile - especially as each pool can have rules for requests and responses. They use sets of conditions and actions to determine how traffic should be handled and conditions can be anything from a local or remote IP address, a cookie, remote port, HTTP header or a URL path. Actions are just as varied and range from HTTP redirects, dropping connections, adding headers or simply gathering logging information. Bandwidth restrictions can also be applied as actions and you can create multiple classes with different maximum bandwidth values.

The appliance has the ability to maintain persistent connections with a variety of methods. Source addresses can be used to ensure traffic from a specific host always goes to the same node within a pool or you can use other methods such as rules or monitored application cookies. There's much more as for each virtual server you can apply service protection classes which limit the number of requests it can handle to stop it getting overloaded. Bandwidth restrictions can be applied wholesale to specific virtual servers and service level monitoring classes used to ensure warnings are sent out if SLAs aren't being maintained. Zeus' TrafficScript tool adds another dimension to the appliance as this can be used to create sophisticated custom traffic management rules. Don't expect to get the hang of TrafficScript in a day as it is a complex tool but is ultimately very powerful.

There's no denying the ZXTM 7400 comes with a premium price tag but it is delivering an unbeatable range of features. During testing we found the appliance particularly easy to use thanks to its well designed and intuitive management interface and it is worth noting that the price does include support for an unlimited number of virtual servers.