F5 Labs and PSIWeb Team To Provide Industry's Only 100% Uptime Guarantee

Business Wire, Nov 24, 1997

SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 24, 1997--

PSIWeb Applies BIG/ip2 Technology To Balance the Load for

Business-critical Web Hosting Services

F5 Labs, provider of innovative server controller technology, today announced that PSIWeb Inc., a subsidiary of PSINet Inc., has chosen the F5 BIG/ip2 to provide 100% guaranteed server uptime for its rapidly-growing PSIWeb Shared Hosting Services.

With more than 23,000 corporate customers in the United States and abroad, PSINet is one of the largest and most experienced Internet service providers in the world. Their services include on-demand and dedicated Internet connectivity, remote access for mobile workers, corporate intranet and security services, and PSIWeb's shared and dedicated Web site hosting. In addition to core connectivity, PSINet offers a variety of value-added business application services such as Internet faxing (PSINet InternetPaper) and electronic commerce (PSIWeb WorldPay, PSIWeb eCommerce). Delivered over the industry's most comprehensive switched Frame Relay network, with 24-hour network monitoring, PSINet is also known for outstanding customer support.

PSIWeb selected F5 Labs' BIG/ip2 technology to maintain continuous 24 hour-a-day, seven day-a-week availability and at the same time balance server loading to reduce unnecessary hardware expense for their web hosting service. While one BIG/ip2 is currently installed, PSIWeb currently plans to install six BIG/ip2 units to accommodate the dynamic growth in their web hosting business.

BIG/ip2 is a dedicated Server Array Controller that intelligently allocates Internet and Intranet service requests across a group of inexpensive, network servers. Residing between the Internet routers and an array of servers, BIG/ip2 continually monitors each server for application availability and performance. On the front end, it oversees all incoming web queries and automatically directs each service request to the most appropriate and available server for subsequent processing. By balancing all of the incoming web requests across the content servers, the product substantially reduces the number of server failures due to overload conditions.

By detecting application, server and network failures in advance and routing service requests accordingly, the product essentially guarantees fail-safe, timely responses to user queries. Moreover, BIG/ip2 stands alone due to the fact that the product itself has complete, built-in redundancy. Consequently, there is no single point of failure along the entire path, from backbone to server.

Before implementing the BIG/ip2, to ensure accessibility and avoid the possibility of a single point of failure, PSINet replicated each customer's web site on two servers, nominally located on the east and west coast. Server access was allocated by round-robin DNS, in which each request was randomly routed to the two servers. To ensure fast server response, PSIWeb limited each server pair to 200 customers. When additional customers signed up for hosting services, PSIWeb would roll out an additional pair of servers.

While providing reliable load distribution, PSIWeb engineers were moving to provide even greater reliability and performance for their Web Services customers. "PSIWeb serves business customers who are relying on the Internet more and more for corporate processes," clarified Ed Frankenberg, Director of Web Products for PSINet. "To maintain our reputation as the industry innovator, we needed to find ways to deliver a more reliable and better performing system. With the dynamic growth we are enjoying in our web hosting service, we also need a completely scalable solution."

PSIWeb needed a distributed server architecture that would make all of the connected servers act as one large server. PSIWeb realized that the new architecture would allow PSIWeb to confidently offer a 100% uptime guaranteed. After a thirty to sixty day evaluation period in which PSIWeb studied all the available solutions, they selected the BIG/ip2 solution from F5 Labs.

"We demanded a completely fault tolerant system. We also wanted a combined hardware/software solution," explained Frankenberg. "While we looked at software solutions, we found they were pricey, and when combined with the new hardware they required were actually more expensive than the BIG/ip2." Frankenberg also wanted a Unix-based system, not one that relied on a proprietary operating system. "If something goes wrong at 3:00 A.M., or you simply need to make a change in your system, you want to know exactly how the entire system behaves and why."

PSIWeb engineers installed the first BIG/ip2 themselves, though they had representatives from F5 on hand for assistance. "After thirty to sixty days of studying F5 and the rest of the field, we had a good understanding of how to deploy and install the system.

"The system went in without a hitch. The BIG/ip2 does exactly what F5 says it is going to do, and just the way they say." While PSIWeb currently has multiple UltraSPARCs connected to the BIG/ip2 and they can easily increase this number to transparently add capacity. "Whether we have three, four, five or twenty servers connected to BIG/ip2, it looks like one seamless server to the outside world. When traffic increases we can add more servers to the BIG/ip2, and when the BIG/ip2 gets to its capacity, we can just deploy more BIG/ip2 boxes.