From an industry insider--a close look at high-performance,end-to-end switching solutionsLoad balancers are fast becoming an indispensable solution forhandling the huge traffic demands of the Web. Their ability tosolve a multitude of network and server bottlenecks in the Internetage ranges from dramatic improvements in server farm scalability toremoving the firewall as a network bottleneck. This book provides adetailed, up-to-date, technical discussion of this fast-growing,multibillion dollar market, covering the full spectrum oftopics--from server and firewall load balancing to transparentcache switching to global server load balancing. In the process,the author delivers insight into the way new technologies aredeployed in network infrastructure and how they work. Written by anindustry expert who hails from a leading Web switch vendor, thisbook will help network and server administrators improve thescalability, availability, manageability, and security of theirservers, firewalls, caches, and Web sites.